Sublime

Tom had read aloud a Seamus Heaney poem, ‘Blackberry Picking’, and was talking about landscape as a source of allegory, as well as political and social commentary. The challenge was to find fresh ways to describe nature, he said, to see its potential for secrets, for clues.

He’d lost perhaps half an inch in height, and gained perhaps an inch in breadth; but generally speaking the years had glanced off him without damage, and he was as unaltered as Bethesda’s pews.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.