Brian Walter
When I once taught poetry
a colleague asked me to work up
an anti-litter poster for her project:
I had more to show, I reflected,
than tell; and so I drifted across the road
to the empty plot of long dry grass
to glean scraps of our humanity
from a mental metre I marked out
and squared amongst the stunted shrubs,
and I collected all the litter there
to pin up, annotate, and hopefully
to engender reflection on what we do.
Mine was so unlike the other posters
that people stopped and pointed,
but I saw that what caught their eyes
amongst chip packets, flat milk cartons
and plastic was the old story, the mystery
of the torn open pink condom sleeve.
(published in This Recurrence of Light, Ecca, 2022)
Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 4 August 2022 as one of the Ecca poets