Branta Leucopsis

Branta Leucopsis

Trees dropped. Clinker 
 keel, stem, strakes and hull.
 Mosses pulled to drag dreki
 from port to sea.
 Invaders in Drekars
 crash into breakers
 on the teeth of Stert Point.
 Sucking themselves along the mud
 slacks of The Parrett,
 driftwood drawing back –
 The undertow, the salty mire
 pulling back the wood and wire.
 Festering in the flotsam –
 goose-pimples muster
 breeding black gems.
 Spawns of barnacles hatch foetal poles
 and polymers sprout primal limbs –
 amber pores turn umber.  
 Branta Leucopsis bubbles from the lumber
 hunting thermals and feed,
 pockets of earth,
 weather windows,
 to get back to the Longship lands
 where men made them from splinters.

R. M. Francis

R. M. Francis is from Dudley. He’s a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and author of five poetry pamphlet collections. His debut novel, Bella, is out in March 2020 with Wild Pressed Books, and Smokestack books will publish his first full collection of poems, Subsidence, in October 2020. In 2019 he was the inaugural David Bradshaw Writer in Residence at the University of Oxford; these four poems began during that residency.