Worm

by Giles Goodland

We are broke and feel at the wound edge, the blind

valleys the wide, the pencil-lined streams, and

onto the plains the broad shelves, the fractured

leaf, vernacular manure, uncut

grass. Moon’s event

trudges towards us, ratcheting

to unsay its syllable

to be certain the day winds up.

I have been charged with feeling,

my head lolls on its earth chest.

~

Giles Goodland‘s books include Of Discourse (Grand Iota 2023), A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001), Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012), and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). Civil Twilight was published by Parlor Press in 2022. He has worked as a lexicographer, editor, and bookseller, and teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University’s department of continuing education, and lives in West London.

Featured image: Drawing by Sabine Miller, 2024.

Artist note: we resurge through language, the surge in language reminds me of the earthiness of the animals we translate in poems. Snails are known to turn and slugs to draw into themselves their own antennae, so my poems see the most grounded animals as those most linked to the eventual and possible post human resurgence we shall eventually see.