Poem by Daisy Edwards

There is a tree in a museum, sorry, what I mean to say is
that there’s a bolt of lightning in this rib cage and
they’re being cooked from the inside, no, what I meant was
all the clocks have stopped in this marble of mine.

The bark, long waxed and stained by sun light and sticky fingers,
stops the minute hands in their predictable dance. Stops
the ocean of footsteps, stops the tired parents,
the even more exhausted toddlers. Stops them all. Stops everything.

We taste ozone here and ash and axe steal and we want to scrape our tongues, sorry,
that’s a bit gross, isn’t it? We want to taste it properly, we do, we do, we want to
know everything this tree saw, smell everything its bark forgot.
I know it’s impossible, but we would be fools not to try.