The crows that perch on her stone
are older than she was.
Their caws go over
her scant twenty inches.
What would she have made
of this maze of graves?
She would have recognised silence,
rain, gently amniotic,
and tiny muffled thuds.
And the air would have stirred
some memory of being wheeled,
just once, outdoors.
But greenness and birds,
and trees like living houses,
and the sky (not even handled
with a word)
- these she now lies under
like her last home,
though she did not stay
long enough to meet them,
and knew neither feather nor stone.
Anna Wigley was the winner of the Poetry Review Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2000.
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