Reclamation

Reclamation

I. Tea Plantation

The pickers have long fled south, to bivouacs 
that drip with cold; the geometry of tea
subverted where muhuti and flame trees
break cover, watching over weeds and vines.

Hyrax scurry from their burrows. Leopards
have returned to where they never knew. 
Cranes circle high above the miracle 
of sunbirds drawing nectar, motionless, 
from coral and jewels they’d never have found before.

Black kites regard the rebel bands in tired 
fatigues and rubber shoes, who thread their quiet 
patrols on paths they’ve reimposed on the faintest 
traces of a matrix overgrown.



II. Seat of power

And far away, where warlords feasted long 
ago, and made their will known to the men 
they charged to make it so—and where a king 
was killed—the broken masonry is mocked 

by oak and birch. A cenotaph’s obscured 
by briars among which feral goats and cattle 
browse—and dogs in sunken doorways wait 
in ambush to reduce those herds to blood 
and bones they’ll bare their teeth and battle for.

The dogs are watched in turn from shadowed vantage 
points by scouts who’ve travelled from their sundered 
homes across a narrow, hostile sea
in search of knowledge of what happened here,
to send back to their camps among the dunes.

This poem was included in Kent & Sussex Folio #76 in 2022. It is part of what I hope will be published as a new collection, of poems exploring the interactions between conflict, peace and place: Guerrilla Country.

(The Muhuti tree is Erythrina abysynica)