A Poem by Clare Pollard

Pollen

The medium death chose, this time, was love.
Kindness, or what we’d thought was kindness, was now harm
and it was best if we just locked ourselves away,
and didn’t show we cared,
and hardly lived in weeks, which were our work.
One week, though, I recall, the pollen came,
piled in our street like snow, or no, like baby hair –
I saw a boy that stroked its fur,
how, on their walk, girls kicked at it,
its carriage on the air from home to home,
over fences, yards, the apple blossom,
in through kitchen-windows
to where we stared at screens on makeshift desks;
its waver on warm currents of my breath,
how my eyes streamed with tears.
Tell me that you noticed.
And did you close the window too,
uncertain, now, what you were meant to do
with all that tenderness?

Clare Pollard has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, most recently Incarnation. She edits Modern Poetry in Translation. Her latest book is a non-fiction title, Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books (Penguin). Her debut novel Delphi will be published in 2022.