Doryn Herbst, a former water industry scientist in Wales, now living in Germany and is a deputy local councillor.

Her writing considers the natural world and themes which address social issues. Poetry: Fenland Poetry Journal, Amsterdam Quarterly, Green Ink Poetry and more. Forthcoming: Osmosis. She is a reviewer at Consilience.

 

I was a stick-figure

 

walking an earth stamped flat,

an outline of a person

 

where the whole should have been.

All bone and grisle,

 

no flesh, no blood.

A stick-figure head

 

with no eyes and no mouth.

Half the mind dis-engaged

 

and less than half a life.

But there was something,

 

a weight pressing hard

on my stick-figure chest,

 

forcing the breath

out of my stick-figure lungs.

 

Something Precious

 

Once, someone stole something precious

from me and I lost part of myself,

became a ghost, a shadow

 

so true to life nobody noticed

that I wasn’t quite whole.

 

And the world lost some of its pain

but also, some of its colour.

 

Sometimes, it felt like

I was in a dream,

but I wasn’t sure I was me

because I couldn’t see my own face

and all around the edges were blurred

and time barely moved.

 

There are moths that are attracted

to the burn of a lamp thinking

it’s the moon. Others make

their own anti-freeze to survive winter. 

 

I learnt to listen to the pulse

coming up from the earth, the violet

murmur coming out of the woods,

the song of a robin

in the stillest of winters

 

while I stitched together the gaps

to resemble a crocheted life,

collected daisies to patch over

the holes.

 

There is no quiet

 

I remember a day, it was raining hard.

Thunder so loud, it shook the ground,

jolted the beams in a grieving home.

 

Ants streamed out of cracks,

spread out into the rooms.

Hot and red, they walked over my feet,

crawled up my legs,

raised welts on my skin.

 

Rigid as stone, I could not run.

 

Later, I rubbed ice on the sores.

 

Beasts lie low in this house, waiting

to strike again. But their deeds will not

remain buried under the floor

or stuck in the walls

for ever.

 

Their secrets will be exposed,

when the time is right,

when the beasts

least expect it.

 

There is no quiet,

the house still creeks.