Roshni Gallagher’s Even The Trees takes us from Scotland to Guyana, and many places in between, with poems exploring memory, moments, migration and landscape. We hope you enjoy these three wonderful poems from the collection.

Even The Trees
By Roshni Gallagher
Published by Bloodaxe

Threshold  

for Ganga and Maureen, 1960/70s 

Ganga leaning in London weather, in a crowd  

of white men, all drinking pints outside the local pub,  

before the policeman accuses him of stealing  

the empty glass, that had been cold and pleasant  

in his hand. And Sam Selvon painting the walls  

of a friend’s house in Crail, thinking of the Dundee  

women who bring their shopping to the writing  

workshop. And when night sweeps across the water  

whole streets fall dark and listen. As Cap listens  

at his window desperate with hunger  

waiting for a plump gull to land on the sill.  

The policeman who turns up, on Ganga’s  

doorstep, with a warrant, is stunned into apology  

at the sight of the white woman who opens  

the door and stands unmoving in the threshold.

Bird Cherry  

To teach myself belonging  

I try to find the name  

of the blossom tree darkening  

by the window. 

Bird cherry or sweet cherry –  

from the curve of its leaves  

I hold each possibility of its ungrown  

berries in my mind.  

If I met my great-great grandmother  

I wouldn’t know the name  

of the language she spoke.  

Bird cherry or sweet cherry.  

In the dusk, the petals fall in drifts  

like sea foam.  

The soil remembers  

everything it used to be –  

carbon, fracture, petal.  

Last month, the full white blossoms  

swelled and blotted out the sky. 

Cullykhan Bay 

Lying together in the bell heather,  

during the Perseid shower, a short walk  

from Hell’s Lum. The red stone cliffs  

looked like a person curled up asleep.  

There must have been great gusts  

of wind somewhere, propelling the turbines  

but I felt that there was no distance  

between you and me, and no one to say  

we deserved less than what we had.  

Half-awake, I saw a shoal of fish  

in the night sky, shivering metallic,  

falling towards us. 

Even The Trees by Roshni Gallagher is published by Bloodaxe, priced £12.99.