poetry

I have one pro-tip about gardening...

...it’s better to do it yourself, writes poet and artist Frieda Hughes – who’s not shy about donning her waders and getting amongst the lily-pads

Friday 11 October 2024 14:26 BST
Slowly, their unstoppable extensions / Shrank fish-space as if absorbing water
Slowly, their unstoppable extensions / Shrank fish-space as if absorbing water (Frieda Hughes)

WATER LILIES

Quietly, beneath fish and the reflection of sour sky

During a year in which the sun barely rose to its knees,

The tubers extended their gnarled wrists

And lily-sprout fingertips. Their thousand frond roots

Like skeins of hair, tangled in the depths, melting

Into the rot and sediment of their previous incarnations.

Slowly, their unstoppable extensions

Shrank fish-space as if absorbing water.

Their exuberant bulk found a foothold in every pond angle.

The fish nose and nudge against the firm cellulose

That contains them, and today, a day without rain,

I must wade into the morass and saw logs of lily-flesh

From the silt, chest-deep in waders, iced to the bones of my feet.

The saw must not touch the liner, invisible beneath lily-mass,

Nor must I tear it, as fragile as it seems now

Against the passage of time. In the back of my mind

My fish are gasping for air, and there,

Examining me, is one small orange body,

Flickering like a candle in the cold clamp of winter

That drags in its first chill before I even escape.

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