[Digital Poetics 4.1] Two Poems by Shani Cadwallender

Blakewinter

looks vascular 
that leafless branchful wintering;

but see your vision

inflects blanks  with

notice: Peckham Rye is Blakemarked.

it’s enough to drive you 
to god
[wings’ photo-negative,
bone-white on blackened twigs],

you made 
angels of exposure
you made 
Ezekiel of nitric lungs

but scratch/ that /copper/ etch.

these branches 
pick a way 
circuitous,
mycelia 
undermining

what’s engraved:

this is not your turf. 

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Deceptions 

notice: streetlamplight makes false summer/a photo-synthetic lightening/on leaves, deceived/to linger/whispering close-clustered rustle/wherein there’s a likening that /throws 
my greenness in relief
against the beam
of your bright 

EYE:

how I wither                        outwith

your fair-weather warmth.

how, unlit,

                            outside your noticing

          I

                 can’t  

hang 
       

             on

but it just seems 
the more deceived in this conceit is
eye can’t stop seeing things 
my way mistaking eye for I 
mining greenness leaves are blind to
for mine taking leaving as participle
a verbal 
slip a lie

but how to retrieve you, then,
otherwise?

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Shani Cadwallender is a London-based poet from North East England who teaches for money and writes and researches for joy, though happily it sometimes works out the other way around, too. A part-time PhD hopeful at Birkbeck, UoL, she is currently working on a practice-based project about C19th arboreal poetry which will comprise a mashup of poetry and traditional research. Her first chapbook, ‘A Crow’s Diet’, was published by Dreich press in 2020. 

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