LOVERS IN THE ELEPHANT GRASS, BY MARC WOODWARD

Sunlight stripes us through the wavering canes
as we lie breathless and high, listening
to the frantic insistence of skylarks,
feeling our hearts recover, pulses slow,
numb to all of time but this one moment,
wild within the elephant grass raffia,
its thin shadow grid moving across us,
so if we half close our eyes we flicker
like the final frames of an old film show
about jailbreak runaways who outwit
the hounds and strip off in a southern field,
shedding more arrows than eager Cupid,
only to find their malnourished bodies
​tattooed with a sweet and biblical crime.

Marc Woodward, a poet and musician living in the rural English West Country, has been widely published in journals and anthologies. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize, won the 2019 Keats’ Footsteps Prize, and was commended for the 2020 Acumen Poetry Prize; and, in 2018, he was awarded a writing residency at The Wellstone Center in Santa Cruz, CA. His collections include  A Fright of Jays (2015), Hide Songs (2018), and  The Tin Lodes, written in collaboration with poet Andy Brown (2020). He blogs at www.marcwoodwardpoetry.blogspot.co.uk