The garden held me like a mother,
cupped in it’s gentle palm as if I were
a spent blossom blown here on the breeze
and for the first time, my bones loosened, relaxed,
as sunlight slipped over slates of a rickety roof
dipping the pale, snow tipped ridge of my spine
in light, the frozen tarn of my chest creaking
and cracking with the slow ache of ice shifting
the grey slush of the city dissolving beneath my fingernails
clogged lungs flushed by a rush of fresh green mountain air
the hoar frosted fells of my heart dripping
sloshing through cobwebbed veins
snowdrops springing suddenly
from the damp earth of my skin
the wind whistling, rippling across secret streams
sap surging in my fingertips
and somewhere inside me, something long lost, something ancient,
was waking, scrubbing the gloom from its misted eyes
blinking, wide eyed, in the scrubbed clean light
of a new day
I unfurled, like the fresh burst of a new sprung blossom
shed my old skin, watched it coil on dew-drenched grass
iridescent in the fragile morning light,
I unfolded, a tightly curled fern tip
I unravelled beneath the dawn sky
silence falling on my skin like fine rain
here, in the garden of a little stone cottage
rocked in the arms of a cumbrian valley
I felt finally, truly, held and so I let go,
let go of the breath I’d been holding my whole life
feeling the first flutter
of my own forgotten wings, the faint strains
of a song once buried beneath
the wintered wasteland of my tired heart.