Where new writing finds its voice
Poem

You know the way life’s shallow bowl

Mark Waldron

is meant to hold a cherry. 
And how the ones who cannot taste or smell can see 

with inky clarity the thumping of the fervent gooseberry. 
And how the hello-deaf can see the devil in a piece of toast, 

or embossed on the see-through shower curtains 
that hang between ourselves and the coloured sky. 

And how even the merely par-blind 
can scent a woman’s pregnancy across a floral room 

and how that smell is like the suckling smell of a child. 
And I’m sure you’ve heard it told that the quite stone-blind 

can hear the water-cooler mutterings of trees 
whose job it is to hold bucolic scenes before the rest of us

in their scratched fingers. 
And the way that they, the lifeless underground are budged 

by sightless moles who’ve sniffed 
that nostril odour of the legless worms

and how the herds of countless black and flightless birds 
were driven on to paper in their hordes.