There are too many empty spaces.

Desert stretches of things we ought to know;

movements and people and crimes

we should have learnt as well

as Wordsworth’s daffodils 

or the world wars in Europe. 

 

We are accompanied

in our centric – lonely in our fight

against all things ‘not right’. 

And our British tongues 

rattle with empty statements

like graveyards of an evening. 

 

There is no oasis. No home

we have built to be proud of. 

Just these desert places 

pushing beaten hearts 

into the corners of crude vellum

maps we cannot bear to pull taut.

 

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Poem: © Kristiana Reed 2020

Between the Trees UK

Between the Trees US