This poem is taken from PN Review 228, Volume 42 Number 4, March - April 2016.

Peak District

Vidyan Ravinthiran
‘The young lambs bound / As to the tabour’s sound’.

They toss and toss: it is as if it were the earth that flung them, not themselves.
It is the pitch of graceful agility when we think that.
                                                                          – Gerard Manley Hopkins

The lambs wear fuchsia digits
wisps of torn cloud

hang from the bossy
roots of hugging beeches
planted close to meld into one bole;

also the wire

whose barbs rust first, drop out and leave
inches of clear air

where harm should be . . . 

~

Why are we here? To flee
our inboxes
stuffed with silence

or rejections; to peer,
half-cut, down a blue road,
phone aloft, hunting for pockets of signal . . . 
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