chain coral Chorus
In the third guest blog and poem for the Chain Coral Chorus, we're really excited to welcome the monumental and award-winning poet, Liz Berry, who takes us through the layers of place and people at Black Country Geosite, Walsall Arboretum. Walsall Aboretum
Listen, the trees are calling us in, their voices the colour of old wenches' hair. They are calling us back, through bark and Lammas flush, sapwood, heartwood, rings of days, in their secret canting of fire and rot. They were born in storm, split by lightning, their bodies boats parting silver waters. We've slept in their cradles, been carried in their bones to the worms' dark banquet and if we come now, surrender ourselves to the earth's green unravelling, it might not be too late -- Walsall Arboretum - June 2021 Walking with Ted, who's four, I find myself so aware of the layers of a place - digging under the soil with a sharp stick; crouched down low rubbing the dirt from a little bibble that looks like an old arrowhead; climbing on the glacial boulder the old uns call the Devil's Toe Nail to pocket the jewel of an empty snail shell. The layers go on, outwards and upwards into the air, as I stand head tilted up, watching his skinny legs shimmy along a branch towards the slender twigs and green of the canopy, knowing beyond there's clouds, and beyond that the secret uninterrupted blue. There's other layers too, when you know a place: the layers of the years, the layers of old selves that still exist there, going about their three year old, eleven year old, twenty year old business. There's me with Mom, age six, waiting for my dad to come from work at social services. Me at the Illuminations watching the man slipping on the lit-up soap into the flashing bathtub. Me with my first boyfriend, listening to Nirvana on a walkman under the trees. This morning, walking through the Arboretum in the sunshine with Ted, all I can think of are those layers, what's buried here - although buried feels like the wrong word, too macabre, too dead - better to say what's living here. Under our feet there's the trampled grass, buttercups, wet-the-beds and daisies, their roots pushing down into the dark soil, sediment rich with worms; somewhere deep below that there's the rough undulations of the old lime workings, the two flooded quarries with their secrets and drownings; deeper still, the Silurian limestone, tropical and unimaginable. Around us, the trees: their bark, cambium, sapwood, the tender heartwood encircling the pith; the way they watch it all, nodding gently or shaking their heads in green dismay. Closer, and more intimate, there's our own layers: Ted's small body and mine. Beneath his thin t-shirt the softness of his hair, skin, cells, fat, muscle, the precious architecture of his skeleton. How once he was inside me, layered like the cross section diagram in the text book, skin and muscle peeled back to reveal the baby, unearthly and singular in the womb. Ted still can't believe there was a time before him. He calls yesterday 'tomorrow' and likes to imagine the microscopic egg he once was, waiting inside me from the moment I was formed. Sitting together on the old bandstand, he looks pleased when I show him a photograph of me there in 1985, eating candyfloss under the lights. I think he's imagining himself there too somehow, all that sweetness and luminescence seeping down into him like rainwater through rock. For that's the way it feels sometimes, human time, all that's been there before us seeping into our being: the courtings, running races, the neat patchwork of a hundred wartime allotments, the pale goosebumped calves of girls jumping into the open air baths, the fights, dog walks, the man who got down on one knee under a flashing pink windmill at the Illuminations and the local newspaper reported "there was electricity in the air". I text my mom to tell her that we're at The Arboretum. "Is he still there," she texts back "that man slipping on the soap?" Liz Berry Walsall Aboretum Listen, the trees are calling us in, their voices the colour of old wenches' hair. They are calling us back, through bark and Lammas flush, sapwood, heartwood, rings of days, in their secret canting of fire and rot. They were born in storm, split by lightning, their bodies boats parting silver waters. We've slept in their cradles, been carried in their bones to the worms' dark banquet and if we come now, surrender ourselves to the earth's green unravelling, it might not be too late -- |
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January 2022
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