December Lore

By Sharon Black

December Lore

i

The berries drip their sweetness

and their sadness to the ground:

they fill the hedge in clusters. Legend says

fairies live below the thorns and woody stems

and if you fall asleep beneath one

you can drop into the otherworld, slip past

the gossamer-winged guards.

From a distance, the hedgerow is a slit

in the green breast of the fields.

The berries redden in the tumbling snow.

ii

Underneath the tangled fringe, dormice

hibernate, waking every ten days

to flush their kidneys clean. Conservationists

unearth each tiny sleeper

buried in leaf litter, lifting each

to weigh it, age it, sex it,

to fill their charts

with numbers, distribution, chances

of long-term survival

in a shrinking habitat, before returning

each curled pink-tipped body

to its small round nest.

iiThe landscape is a postcard,

stamped and shiny and ready to send.

There could be a lover waiting,

or a fast disease. Crab apples

litter the path, green fists

in the slush. Their white pips

huddle in the dark.

If you throw them on a fire

while saying the name

of one you love,

the love is true if the pips explode.

Some fruits are bruised,

others have been smashed by tyres

or feet. The landscape aches

with all the ways                    
a life can come undone.

iv

On a tiny Hebridean island

a crab apple tree

has been growing on a cliff face

since the Ice Age: scientists age it

at eleven thousand years.

It has the purest DNA.

No one lives on there.

There are no other apple trees around for miles.

Each year it flowers then fruits just for itself,

the apples splitting open

in their rush to the sea.

Each year the limbs stretch further,

its roots sink deeper

into impossible beginnings.

Sharon Black is a poet and editor from Glasgow. Though she now lives in the south of France she remains an active voice in the UK poetry community through publication of her own work and through her editorship of Pindrop Press.

Black was born and brought up in Newton Mearns in Greater Glasgow. She studied French at the University of Aberdeen, after which she spent a year working as an English teacher in Japan. On returning to the UK Black began a decade-long career as a journalist; as a features writer at the Centre Press agency in Glasgow she wrote for newspapers including The Evening Times, The Herald and The Scotsman. Since 2001 Black has lived in the Cévennes region of Southern France, where she runs Abri Creative Writing, a retreat venue offering residential courses tailored to writers. In 2016 Black took over the editorship of Pindrop Press from poet Jo Hemmant, with the stated aim of publishing poetry that is “exciting, well-crafted and fresh.”

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