Silver Branch Feature
Dominic Weston
Dominic Weston grew up on the edge of London, but has lived in the West Country ever since he went to University in Exeter to study Drama. Now, he produces wildlife programmes, runs over Somerset hills and writes poetry. His poems can be about family, the natural world, or both, and often undercut by a slick of dark humour. They have appeared in The Alchemy Spoon, Agenda, Black Bough Poetry, Green Ink, Magma Poetry, Poetry Wales, Popshot Quarterly, The North and Under The Radar among others, and featured in anthologies by Candlestick Press, Fragmented Voices, The Iron Press, Live Canon and the Yaffle Press. Twitter: @Limescale Instagram: @FlipFlopFilms
A Father Who Will Never Be Accepts His Own Child
Inclined beyond tipping point
fearless and peerless in new colours
I scan a half-hiding sky
for dying suns
a handful to depict
a new constellation -
The Little Ghost Boy
now nestling
in the sanguine incubator
of my refurbished chest and abdomen.
Blizzard in the Amazon
Puttering into the riverboat’s beam
white noise engulfs our keen tender
an urgent squall of mating moths
Faces carpeted with emerging flyers
we cocoon ourselves in hammocks
storms soon drown out the static
Dawn rolls out a sodden massacre
papier-mâché plastering every deck
a failed generation now waits for us
to sweep it clean.
Dartmoor Pony Bones
Who placed the pony’s bones on the wall?
weighty white clubs
laid in a pelt of deepest moor moss
feigning forgiveness
weapons waiting to be considered
a femur fits the fist well
Someone placed the pony bones
on the wall by the river
giant knuckles, fortune stones
cast ready for the reading
underneath the oak and alder rows
they are not an accident
This is no resting place for a little horse
remnants harness purpose
Freshwater Swimming for Serenity
out….
palm onto palm
slide into absorbing gloom
here and only here
I extend I reach I glide
no end to touch no edge to grasp
only the rhythm is the guide
into the absorbing gloom
palm onto palm
…in
A Twin In Any Dark Window
You dump emotional IEDs in our path
lay booby traps deep in the heart
then scramble to defuse them the instant
the brass knob to the bedroom rattles
You’re the author of a secret tongue
but you can’t bear its solitude
compelled to betray yourself first
to conceal your betrayal of both of us
Your eyelids surrender to semaphore
that insistent and persistent request
S O S
save ours? or just your own?
At 5am you’ll scour the gloom from our upstairs window
tracing the grey rims of the encircling hedges you planted
Doulting Water
Only when April’s light is on the heavy side
the robin lets out a single reed of warning
that its mate should comprehend
the shadow of the jackdaw softens with
its nape beneath the chimney cowling
the crayfish gives up on the glint twitching
the surface of the narrow stream
as the aching eye of another spring sun
slips below the lip of the Charlton Viaduct.
Other wise
To Miranda Sawyer who once said that we are all unique,
just not that special
They’ve never seen you in the way you want
so you carefully incubated teenage shame
condensed it into a bright enamelled pin
and wear it still with such discreet pride
You’ve never grown a thick enough hide
cultivated a series of lurid wounds instead
lathering an oil and acid emulsion that smarts
despite the nonchalance invested in the burden
We’ve never understood all these subtle cues
that ring-fence your self-restrained indignation
but I now know you share the same pain we all do
one none of us have really found a way to name
I’m sorry - if I could have helped I would, but I realise
you won’t find the answers until you write these lines.
Sodden
Crowlet on a chimney sodden
bullet beak aims at the cathedral
shoulders cloaked in drizzle
A single raindrop needles
slips through a chink in
the last ashen feathers of youth
Right wing sidles up
to give the drip the slip
and the left unconsciously echoes
On a fine day the coverlets
are carved from slivers of solid oak
lightning-charred
But in today’s south-westerlies
her messy crown is now a mass
of scrivener’s ink-stained fingers.
Like Charlton Heston Never Knew
I walk into the room like Charlton Heston
the Red Sea closing back behind me
Particles accelerate in my wake
chase each other in lazy velocities
tailbacks spin into spiral galaxies around table legs
flow over mirrored surfaces in ever corkscrewing fluxes
vapour trails follow the minutest movement
a twitch, a single flip of a finger causes
currents to confer and shed near invisible payloads
infinite settlers remobilising in mass rallies
all over on my flat panel tv
How much of myself have I breathed in?
This all-seeing sunshine that shimmers with us through overly
unprecedented and difficult times is making work for me
No one denies dusting needs doing
it’s not as though dusting isn’t done
I do do dusting
but it just keeps coming
It has become apparent wherever you look
that stay at home policies result in peak shedding
the mere act of wafting a drip-dry microfibre cloth
releases ever more squadrons of suicidal skin cells
So now I redefine myself as zen
I am resolved
to just sit still and welcome them
to let their billion upon billion upon billions
settle in an undisputed and eternal
dry downpour
until I occupy my own serene stratum
in the bed of an implausible sea.
The Architecture of Winter
The suffocating muffle and gaudy upholstery
of spring threatens
to hijack the sparse clarity of my landscape
its ebonised prongs
to be foisted with ruched wads and virulent
cloaks of foliation
my eyes mourn the unencumbered engravings
of spiny hedges
skeletal caterpillars bound to the beat of a taut
and timeless horizon
but I can sense the sap-slappy pressure rising
a vernal eruption
again the architecture of winter is under threat
its ruin imminent.
The Crows Are Not Black
This is the cathedral
This is the green
People sit on the green
to eat their lunch
There are two lesbians
with a black puppy
There are two gays
with a nice black bag
There are lots of crows
No one sees the crows
The crows are not black
they are hopping holes
bird-shaped lack of light
a pastry cutter of panic
a tightening heart skipping
through an unending…
Protect Yourself With Fire
The lilies stopped drinking four days ago
I haven’t wound the clock since Falmouth
but one by one I will take on each room
righting them with unwritten order
She said she’d never been so proud
though she’d never get out of the car
to see winter waves carve away the head
Winter waves, carts away the headland
Thought she’d never let me out the car
kept saying she’d never been so proud
Writing them, with unwritten orders
one by one, but I will take them on soon
She couldn’t wind a clock since Falmouth
then Lily stopped drinking four days ago
The Kindest Thing
We left the vets without her
just her collar in hand
I think the pavement was hot
on the short walk home
But the year was about to close
summer’s chapter
usher us on
A new month on Monday
a new job
a new team
And at home
a quiet tunnel of a house
to take it all in.
Two-Thousand-Foot-Long Lines
There is no light
the light is lost so soon
before the bait is a minute down
There is no sound
as the weight lifts muds
untouched, off, off the trenching
There is no colour
in them or in their allies
in skin or hide or shell, it isn’t
There is no knowing
finger on the line
wind on the line, it cannot answer
Thick muscle, slack bellies, jawless
slow and blind and clear
Amassed upon each other
the forgotten, the forbidden, the feared.
"Looking back, I have always written and found challenge and pleasure in writing, but I haven’t always written poetry. I used to love crafting narration scripts for the nature programmes I made, or for other people’s. It was always about supporting what you can see on screen and evoking what you can’t, but never saying-what-you-see, and this, I now realise, was the groundwork for my poetry.
In 2015 I persuaded my bosses to send me on a residential writing course to prep for a major National Geographic series I thought I would be writing the narration for. But what came out was not prose, but poetry, and it has been coming out ever since. For me, it’s all about making connections between things that don’t seem connected – weaving two threads together to come up not with a rope, but a route."
Dominic Weston,
February 2023.
Woodland Portraits
"I created these Woodland Portraits for Silver Branch in a similar way to my poems in that they are made by binding together (at least) two threads, or images, that might not normally sit together. By experimenting, finessing and persistently tweaking them I try to extract a new sense from them, the result of which is often a surprise to me. Sometimes, it can be a safe space to examine darker thoughts and feelings. In these images I was playing around with the idea of a sinister Elven spirit called 'The Erlking', or more specifically 'The Erl King’s Daughter', who in stories was said to ensnare human beings to satisfy her desire, jealousy or lust for revenge. In my case, I am casting myself in the same role with an LGBTQ+ twist as 'The Erl King’s Son', a fabled being to embody the darker corners of myself, who is never too far away, as he permeates the woods on the top of the hill behind my house, existing in every inch of it, but never quite there"
