Three Poems by Karen Leeder

Buddleia

Huge purple boughs that had lifted root
to run wild across a patch of scrub.
Arms straining, dizzy with the scent,
we fetched them in, felt our pulses
slow, our breathing concentrate,
high above the city’s choke and din.
Days later I’m still strangely out of place;
scrubbing at the stains of pollen, trying
to erase what has become ingrained.
But though I scratch the surfaces, I cannot
shake that scent from all the places
it has stored up secretly; and then I
catch myself sniffing at the air, turning
like a dog, to smell it on my hair.

Night light

The great gulls are coming in now,
one by one against the low white sky.

The onion, deep in its quiet earth,
is laying on an extra skin against the dark.

My friend, we are at the thin end of the year:
running after the last light, shifting
to lift our faces to the sun.

Here, now, the leaves are long gone,
blasted and tugged away. And a dahlia caught

unwitting by the first frosts is a brittle star
to light me across this endless lawn.

For the inconsolable

there is this shoe, still warm
and worn to a hole,
the colour of the sky
when souls catch fire,
and the song of the blackbird
after they have gone.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and critic living and working in the UK. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and her translation of Durs Grünbein, Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City (Seagull Books, 2020), won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize 2021.