Invention

BEN MORGAN is a writer based in London. His pamphlet Medea in Corinth: Poems, Prayers, Letters and a Curse is published by Poetry Salzburg and he has also published in Stand, Oxford Poetry, AlchemySpoon, One Hand Clapping and elsewhere.


“Where did we go wrong, do you think?
Probably with the discovery of agriculture”
Hari Kunzru, Interview Magazine, March 2020

We needn’t only leave things as they are.
The great roof of leaves and monkeys is a beauty,
and sometimes, yes, it triumphs over rain –

though the storm will always beat it –
but it grows as you or I grow, as we feed it.
Nor can it outrun us like the deer.

See, here, where the sharp berry
answers your touch with a bite.
She never rears her head as high

as the star-hungry forest, but she bleeds
sweetness in winter; and the limbs
of the bodiless spider are rivers in air,

sailable by foot. The purple hearts,
bruised lips of the goddess,
which purse and beat around our feet

die into life’s blood – food, livid wetness.
All purposeful things are shaped for hands
like yours and mine. Time itself

will fall from us. No more days
like slow-blooming beads of water,
waiting for the crash of an animal,

but a series of small and greater dances,
each nestled in the circle of the larger,
like you, and me, and the children.

We needn’t only leave things as they are.
I learned this last night inside a dream,
then woke in a sweat, thinking he was here,

the one who told me – boarlike in his fatness,
yet his children, who carried his great bier,
thin and trembling as arrows in the wind.