Quiet Green Fireworks on July 4

Here is shadow’s corner of damp cleave,
downstrokes worn by water for water:
unruly tilts and drops. Gravity insists.

Here is shadow’s corner of break, shift and timeless gouge,
seized by a bitter salad of flaring sedges, ferns, roots
and small insurgencies of holly.

Here is shadow’s corner, never powder dry,
not even after cloudless days late June into July.
Here is a humus factory belching breath of moss and leaf.

Here is shadow’s corner mulched with beech and holly husks.
And there is a bed of stones for skimming across the Dart;
an armpit of the river, gentled, foam-freckled,
a lady-in-waiting.

Graham Burchell