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10th February, 2023

Friday Poem – ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson


This week’s Friday Poem is ‘You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her latest collection Goliat.

This cover shows a ghost-like figure wrapped in a sheet standing in a field at dusk. The text reads: Goliat Rhiannon Hooson

Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year shortlisted debut, The Other City. An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.

You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest
It is a gentle, haunted world. Circumstance
has thrown it far into the future,
but there are things in it you and I
would understand: the way silence settles
across a wet morning and the roe deer
raise their heads. Perhaps, also,
a sense of things that need not find
their equilibrium. Our sighs are vapours:
no myth exists to hold us like a heart in aspic.
Again and again the sun sets, swings
under the earth’s belly, lifts a worn edge
of cloud come morning. Perhaps we grieve
for language, realising our fluency was false. Words
are a closed loop. A tight knot.
The roe deer raise their heads, move
between the trees, listening for wolves.
Pale moths and the moon’s white light.
Where once we walked, water rises.
You and I are ghosts in the future’s forest.

Goliat is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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