Listening ear by Ros Barber
Here, I am listening.
Once precisely engineered
and now, cracked to my aggregate:
I can still hear
everything.
Ìý
Grass rubbing the air.
Ten yards away, a tiger beetle
sausaging eggs from its rear. Someone’s name
in the next town, tossed up like a coin.
Your shoes, breathing.
Ìý
See the horizon?
I can hear that fold of sea
all the way to France;Ìý and when it arrives,
tune my sense to the precise note
of a single shell that rattles under its flop.
Ìý
And each thing, being listened to,
listens back.
A dark bedroom, an imagined step -
each thing, being listened to,
hushes.
Ìý
The wind drops.
A dandelion resists the urge to seed,
cradles the huge sound of its genes leaving.
A muscle unfurling its oily foot towards a groyne
plays dead.
Ìý
A woman breaking bread in St-Nazaire
stills herself with a sixth sense.
I burrow beneathÌý her held breath,
seek the constriction of fibres in her chest,
their lock trembling high as a telephone wire.
Ìý
Yes, I can still hear everything,
and I assure you, everything is quiet as the grave.
But put your ear to mine and you will hear
the molecular stretch of lichen growing
cell by cell.ÌýÌý
— Ros Barber
