Into The Woods

Into the fading light

the pink curiosity of a summer evening

something known, absolutely; something loved, absolutely

and everything I have yet to see.  

The trees, and the way they move and sing

lacy skirts of ivy gilded in a 7 o’clock glow

the waterfall-hush of leaves and the syncopated beats of the woodpecker

thud-thud-thud in my chest and jaw, and I don’t have

a bedtime any longer, so if I wanted I could wait 

for the owls to wake up.

Through the peach-stained trunks, the lustrous paint-stroke movements

of a deer, all slender leg and kohl-wrapped eye and in the undergrowth

fast uncanny ruffling, and I won’t ever see what made the

ferns dance.

I wait.  In the gentle gold, a figure is forming, and I see

my mother, and outrunning the seasons and the years and the endless cycle of 

green and red and brown and bare, there is a younger me 

running to meet her where the sun

makes the woods

magic.

Daisy Harris

Hands, Wrists, Teeth

Locked you in the shed when you came back screaming.

I know maybe that wasn’t the welcome you were hoping for –

you were Lazarus for me, holy in your rotting clothes.

I remember a few years ago you brought home a little plant

precious in its tiny pot; it staggered under the frosts that spring

clawed its way back to green, died again, did the same.  You were 

so patient with it, even when I told you just to let it die.

I sat with my back against the door so that I could listen to you breathe.

You were breathing, and between breaths you told me that

you’d missed me; you wanted to touch me; you missed watching me sleep.

That last one made me shudder a bit.  I imagined us curled in our shared bed

months ago before any of this happened, and you played with my hair

and when you did you left gold-leaf traces of death strewn through it.  Enough

was enough.  I unlocked the door but didn’t go inside.

You came to me instead, the way you always did

Sunday mornings with the paper and a lottery ticket.  When it came down to it

you always picked the unlucky numbers.  You didn’t touch me the way 

you wanted; you walked around until I was looking at you, pulled my eyes to you

like a loose thread.  Hanging.  Red.

You used to

kiss me, hands, wrists, teeth.  I pulled my eyes into a saline kaleidoscope

imagined you were not dead

just dirty.  I reached for your face through the haze, and you turned your 

cold mouth to my hand like it was everything you wanted.

“Why were you screaming?” I asked.  I felt you smile against my palm

so dry.  “You’ve always been a heavy sleeper,” you replied.

I opened my eyes.  Stepped forward.  Gave you my throat

my hands

my wrists

my teeth.

“Then wake me up,” I said.

Daisy Harris

Inspired in part by this excellent poem: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-cAIr1FaGy/

Moon

I would like to think it was moon-madness

that made you stop looking at me like I was something that glowed.

In the rain-washed morning I stood

like I was your star again; at the end of the lane

and you told me to go, please.  Before I do something

stupid.

So I ran

to the trees where the hares and the barn-owls lived

creatures that spoke the soft language of dusk

for I could feel myself receding like the day, gone.

He said he does not love me, said it like it was plain as 

a pine tree.

The lunar hare winked its large eye at me

and sent my soul to merciful quiet.

I woke.

On earth

I paced and fretted.

Chased the flickering reflections across the surface of a cup of tea;

saw me, always chasing you, and you, always running.

Sang a song with all the other hapless searchers

both a siren and a dying swan

hoping my voice cut a path back to somewhere familiar

under a hollowed retrograde moon.

I slept in fitful swells of water

woke to chilly neap-tides, wished without fruition for spring.

You have to swim a bit, said the moon-hare.  Sorry.

One night I woke and there were 

waves 

in my heart again

and I took my place in the sky.

Daisy Harris

Tough To Be A Bug

Damselflies were my mummy’s favourites;

we saw lots of them that summer, low over the water

elegant and oddly-proportioned, and I was just growing into my teenage body

and wanted to kiss you, often.

Boys break my heart, but girls do it better.

Something taught, something known, perched on my shoulder like a beetle

says You can never have this.

I’m just curious about how your wrists look next to mine, what our 

hands might do together if we’d nothing better to do than intertwine them.

I’m sorry if I treated you like 

an experience.

I only write because if I don’t write I will scream.  And I learned a lot of things

from the way that I felt about you, all those long months ago.  It wasn’t sunny;

I preferred the way it felt when he touched me, like his fingers drew fireflies in the air.

I don’t like many girls, but when I do, I thought you should know that

they all have your wide, amazed eyes.  You built castles in my mind

and I left them to rot in ivy-hung grace while I loved the sunshine boys who

left me hurt.  I think if I were an insect I would like to be 

a bee, a big fat bumble.  

A bee flits from flower to flower, and doesn’t 

think much about the colour of each one.  

Daisy Harris

How Did The Sky Look?

Like the rush of dawn re-emerging from behind the lanky tree-tops

a quiet powder-blue marbled with white.  How’d the sky look

when you realised you had 

time?

It was time to live like 

the summer hadn’t died.  I thundered like a young

storm-cloud, bursting with brittle rain.  Everything was miles wide

and we had years

and we had years

and we had years

to live in it.  

Daisy Harris

Grief

Sometimes

in dark, sometimes in light when something else hurts too much to think about

sometimes suddenly, like an avalanche; other times with an aching slowness 

a creeping horror honeys my limbs, drawing flies.  My bed becomes the only thing

soft enough to touch.  I cry like a dying animal might: soft, pointless, no alarm only agony.  

In the mirror I’m like a preliminary sketch 

of myself: pale and wrongly-proportioned.  I will shower, and lean against the back wall

and wrap my arms around myself, gentle like the spring sun, steadfast like the tide.  I hold

small hard objects – a pendant, a plectrum, a little silver ring – run my thumb over the ridges and knots, feel the weight of time before.  Never is the hardest word; want is difficult, water 

gone down the wrong way, scouring my throat.  I won’t eat properly for days – when I do

I pillow my meals with sugar and starch, ply my wildest hours with television until they’re tame. 

Exhaustion sets in; but sleep is quiet, and my dreams are soft as kittens

tumbling over and over.  

After a few days, I will wash my hair

and call a friend 

and tell them I’ve been sad.

Bearing Fruit

The earth took me from my long sleep

something bout the rhythm of it invited dance;

the way the rowan staggered swiftly upward

while the oak stood unmoving in its monstrous splendour.

The bright movement of the sparrows was delicious;

I couldn’t help but echo their fleetness

as I wandered south to where the valley cupped its hands in prayer.

You can pray all you like

there’s no getting rid of me.  Back in the day 

you had a name for me that was all throat; I 

wonder what you would call me now.  Man can’t sing like 

he used to.  Into your streets I become a shadow, a suggestion

a rising of the hair on your arms, a warning to your errant kids.  

Where’s my song?  When did you forget how to be properly scared?

I know what I do to you.  You become rabbits

all your nicenesses gone, lost in the scuffle of feet

and the whites of your eyes.  Where are your words 

when you first see me?

I’ll wait till half-light; you’ll see the way I stare

the way a skull does.  I command the countryside

and I won’t be settled till the harvest’s half done.  

How’d you like that?  

Me, I don’t think you can bear the thought that 

someone knows better than you, and I do!  I promise

the things I’ve seen, the years I’ve lived, I can’t even remember

when the jig first started, only that there was

warmth and wine.  The earth gave me breath and 

then it gave me you; and in the spring I rise

like fog and fill the hills with quiet fear and 

listen to the wind-borne birdsong.

Daisy Harris

Euphoria

Seventeen and a rockstar

inflated ego from a year of hard knocks and bad skin and

I floated, witch-like, from everything; I could only assume

there was magic in my addled blood, either that or

I didn’t care.  And both had power beyond the 

one-way station town.

I had a t-shirt I wore in

like the sense I had of strength; a teenage lurcher

I’ve had the worst, now give me the best give me the loudest give me

everything!!!

I kissed you in that t-shirt;

you weren’t everything, and I was so scared the next day –

but this was what it felt like to end things

on my own terms, this was absolute power

this named me a king.  Of course the fall came next

crying in school.  It wasn’t about you

it was about my mother.  I lost myself in the frozen streets

grew only when given drink

and all the while the knotted yew tree in my chest 

cried for blood.  The world became a confusion of colour

and I forgot the point.  Then I remembered it

somewhere along the cold seafront

hidden where my hands found my friends

laughing.  

Relief felt like the good lemonade, like drugs

like screaming blue sky and I knew

I didn’t want to die

alone anymore.  I cut my stupid hair to my chin and

turned eighteen

and started to grow up

better.  

Daisy Harris

Pink, Like Your Brain

This one’s about how 

when I was sixteen

I loved the song ‘Cut To The Feeling’

by Carly Rae Jepsen.

Oh my God I was obsessed

I’ve tried to rationalise it a hundred ways:

it sounds like the songs that used to play on CBeebies, and I’m pretty nostalgic

always searching for a way to hold the past alongside the present;

I was going through a rough patch and I needed the pure unbridled joy of it

a sugar rush with heart!

but I think the real answer is that

it’s just a really fucking good song.

The song is pink and blue

pink like my brain pink like Pink In The Night and Rose-Coloured Boy pink like

pilling prom dresses and Echo Falls and the sky before school in the winter and

blue like broken ice

And here was pop!  Beneath the frozen surface of synth there was

thunder and light, and I’d found something I could head-bang to 

in my room to keep the dark 

away.

I still bloody love that song!  

and grateful for the way it made me feel

open like the sky

for the way that it let the noise in:

all the things I kept out, all the sugar and light 

in the world.

Daisy Harris

To become enlightened listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlsu7RhOnsQ

The City

Lulled

like a kid asleep, reeling down night-hushed streets, into

the arms of the suburbs.  My silver bike cuts through the wild galaxies of rush-hour traffic

and I whisper the word astronaut into the cigarette-smoke funk of my kitchen.

In dreams I become as long as the shadows on the kerb, see the watermarked

patchwork of old labour and new money 

in real time.  I grew up yearning for the odd feeling of Old West England

the Brompton-bike businessmen its wild cowboys, pursuing the retreating steer of 9am

into the crosshatched streets.  I never felt so small and young as when I realised

I chose the rows of red-brick houses as a place I loved enough to choose again.

Again, and again, studying the bristling figures of Lowry’s landscapes, again

in a mud-flecked park, again, in yearning memories, again, again, please

just one more time.  

The tattooed arms of the artists’ quarter stretch skywards in the sun

loud with music and wanting.  I bought ice-cream in a golden room once

lifted above, pigeon-like, as the streets below sang their tidal work-songs

in, out, red light, green light, go.

From the vintage shops I plucked armfuls of the brashest clothes

declared myself a hippy; a punk; a prep; a city girl.

Into the room that was only mine I became only me, but it was not a lie:

the room was in the city too.  I came to understand the sprawling limbs

the churning organs, the way the heart moved; some parts quiet, some parts loud.

Into the sky over the hill with the view I whispered a wish

again, and again, and again

please

never let me go.

Daisy Harris