Listening ear by Ros Barber

Here, I am listening.

Once precisely engineered

and now, cracked to my aggregate:

I can still hear

everything.

 

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.

 

See the horizon?

I can hear that fold of sea

all the way to France;  and when it arrives,

tune my sense to the precise note

of a single shell that rattles under its flop.

 

And each thing, being listened to,

listens back.

A dark bedroom, an imagined step -

each thing, being listened to,

hushes.

 

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.

 

A woman breaking bread in St-Nazaire

stills herself with a sixth sense.

I burrow beneath  her held breath,

seek the constriction of fibres in her chest,

their lock trembling high as a telephone wire.

 

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.  

— Ros Barber