A Rooting Gift

(for Knute Skinner)

Sometimes it's all we have, a bone-deep
Turning of the soil,
So that when we fold back the new earth
It's as if we'd turned our own skin inside-out,
And found the skull-white sharding of a stone
To be a skelping of bone on bone.
Root and nerve twist and rope, a rush
Of water like blood to the head,
A knuckle's worth of hills —
We could go on, finding the shape of ourselves
Capped in a wig of moss,
A rig of knitted-up bare branches,
A woven door —
A roof of flesh without a floor.

copyright © Fred Johnston, 2004.

Fred Johnston was born in Northern Ireland in 1951 and was educated in Toronto and Belfast. He is now based in Galway in the Republic of Ireland, where he teaches Creative Writing at the University as part of the Adult and Continuing Education Programme. He founded Galway's annual literary festival, the Cuirt, and runs a writers' centre for the city. Being Anywhere – New & Selected Poems recently appeared from Lagan Press, Belfast. He has published 8 collections of poems, 2 novels, one collection of short stories, and has had 3 plays performed.