Silver Branch series

Helen Laycock

Helen Laycock is a Pushcart-nominated poet, one of the winners of Black Bough Poetry’s Chapbook contest and shortlistee of The Broken Spine’s Chapbook competition. Her collection ‘FRAME’ was chosen as Book of the Month at the East Ridge Review and, as a featured poet at Black Bough's festival in Wales, she performed several pieces from ‘ELEMENTAL’. Other collections include ‘BREATHE’, ‘13’ and ‘RAPTURE’.

Publication includes After…, BBC Upload, Reflex, Ekphrastic Review, Lucent Dreaming, Popshot, Black Bough, The Storms Journal, Broken Spine, Fevers of the Mind, Cabinet of Heed, The Winged Moon, The Caterpillar, The Dirigible Balloon, Flash Flood, Three Drops Press, Visual Verse, Onslaught, Frazzled Lit, Paragraph Planet, CafeLit, Literary Revelations, Blink Ink, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dark Winter Lit and Rough Diamond. She was recently featured at The Starbeck Orion and there are several imminent exciting publications on the horizon.

NIGHTFIRE

Behind the foothills,

before the stifle of light,

the hot copper of a dropped sun swills

in a sooty brazier

and,

for a moment,

the molten sky tastes of apricots;

trickles of black ink run

into slabs of trunk,

their tapers buoying

the puffball moon,

and in the tempered douse

of the burnished clouds

a speckle of bats

vanish

like ash

and the last fragment

of day.

First published by Black Bough in ‘Sound and Vision’

Pushcart nomination from Black Bough

RECOLLECTIONS

Our metal bones ached;

we tasted tin.

Ice bolts skewered each fingertip

as we pressed skin to bark,

but our old friends had iron hearts,

each desperate branch a stopped artery.

We left chains in the snow to

stone anchors while others

took turns to flip a cat with a stick,

already immortalised as a question mark.

First published by Black Bough in ‘Winter Collection, Vol. 4’

BLOODLESS

A black and white day.

Naked trees. Stripped sky.

Pale geometry darkframed

in sugarwebbed capillaries.

Snow cats recline on dipping limbs.

Brittle fingers beckon the sun: Untuck.

But blood has set and the lungs

of the landscape are heavy with breath.

The birds have swallowed their song.

Nothing stirs. Nothing stirs.

First published by Black Bough in ‘Winter Collection, Vol. 4’

LOSING IT

Her necklace broke, the bling slipping

from the slit throat of the garrotted sky,

stagnating for a shocked second, splitting

the night with its sharp white,

while a bellow gathered, distilling

in the hollow of her rumbling belly,

to be emitted with all her breath, all her might,

halting its fall, eviscerating the crystals

in their jagged flight; and then she slumbered,

bare and dark, mending in the milk of moonlight.

First published by Black Bough in ‘Sun-Tipped Pillars of our Hearts’

Longlisted for the Dai Fry Award for Mystical Poetry

EARTHMOTHER

Boned and blooded with rock,

yet soft-faced, she coaxes

susurrating zephyr to seedscatter.

Arms linked with sunshaft,

she drops aqueous anchors to draw

a silent roar of green from sepulchral depths,

their beckoning curves balmy as moonsliver.

She slippers aching soles in mossvelvet,

and, with an artist’s soul,

engraves leafthread, ridges treespine,

whittles lightning root, stipples sugarfruit.

Flashing fish bead her crystal necklaces;

she fronds feather, furthatches,

embellishes field and sky.

Skyswilling paper throats until ink

blueruns, her exquisite messages wait

to unfold.

Her pulse beats in every entity.

And she has made us

treacherous guardians

beneath her halo.

EXPECTATION

Curled in a seashell

sunk in my skin,

you hear my heart surge.

Away from the swell,

you dwell,

a membrane away

from the salt-lash,

the splintered wrist-pull

into soft wreckage.

You pale,

unfurled

in the wash of the waiting world;

frail waves splash:

cool you

blue.

First published by Black Bough in ‘Afterfeather’

FALLOUT

An armory of screams is

buried

in deepbellied gunpowder,

harnessed momentum

perpetually greypulsing.

At the intake of breath,

a murmuration of fragments

stirs…

The shockpunch

gathers them

into a cannonball of bunched eagles

swaddled in saltpetred wings.

Silverflare accelerates

through the tight valley of the dark throat,

talons dragging,

sparks flashing

as claw whets flesh.

Screamspikes protract

every compass point.

An eruption clouds

truth.

Face-searing feathers flock

and burn,

an abrasion of white ash

grating eyes,

forcing tide to shore.

Wet tornado tails

slap skin, and

a moment

before the silence,

you wake yourself

with the sound

of denial.

PUNGENT

I am a small child

bundled between bodies

in the bulging backseat, breathbillow

whisky-ing from the wheel,

the winding mountain ice-bandaged.

I wake

to the light-rush of a hospital firmament.

Sleep. Black.

I wake

to white,

thick-scalped;

I fill the moons of my fingernails with bloodrust.

Spiderthreads hold me together.

I inhale the petrol-cling

which flooded me.

I was rebirthed

in smoking cliff-teeter,

a windscreen-delivery into teen-terror arms

while,

at the valley spine,

head-tilters whispered,

‘No one survived that.’

SKIDDAW

A fireleg rainhike,

Skiddaw’s jagged bones snagging

sodden boots.

Slateslip.

A sudden blindtangle in

her unruly white hair –

a rowdycloud assault.

Skyscream.

An igneous tooth

is scud-ripping,

dismembering the smoke

of hellish souls,

oblivion roaring

from their gaping mouths.

I breathe wet paper.

Become poetry-bound.

Shrink.

A foetus

pounded

by the contractions

of thick, labouring vapour,

face mucus-slick,

not gestating or expelled.

Consumed.

Aloneness

greypads me,

swaddles me.

I crawl inside my skull,

further away

from nothing.

ANATOMY OF A DREAMER

My bones are shells,

my blood the ocean;

moon-motivated,

wind-steered,

I hold the reins of the land

in a loose grip

so I can wash away

to the soft edge

where there is only blue pulse

and possibility.

BLUSH

In the stillness of afternoon light,

a cumulus of flamingos

blossoms above a silver pane,

its edges blunt as rolling mercury.

They puff like peonies on hinged stems

pink-soldered with knots for étendu,

golden-eyed pools of sunset

imprinted on the lake in

little ridged reflections.

Necks fluid as calligraphy,

they write of love

and freedom,

folding like river bends,

or the silk shimmy of

a dropped scarf.

A ruffle of rump petals trills

in a breeze-shift,

their

fringed capes with

feathered clasps lifting

and settling to curve

each strawberry-stirred quenelle.

How they would melt on the tongue.

* étendu is a ballet term describing the stretching of the toe, ankle, and knee, which then results in a straight leg from hip to pointed toe.

HARE

Still as a doorstop, he is upright,

tight on haunches,

saucer-cheeked,

scrubbing brush-bristled,

white threads needling the air.

Fire burns around

the nugget of coal in his oval eyes,

meaty featherears pocketing sound.

A shot.

He unfolds. Elongates, bunches, elongates, bunches:

a meadowloom,

a mesh of legs

beating like a thresher,

a roll of muscles

pebbling his frame,

the brown blur in the green chicane,

now barely a timberknot.

AFTER THE HUNT

Fox

lollops on to the baize,

cocktailed by a shock of blazing matchsticks,

a thatch of brushwood at his rump.

Stops,

paw raised.

Tapered snout swings to the window,

nose a compass for a stranger in red,

the magnetic north of danger.

His chest swells like bellows

and steam billows his whittled jaw.

Gazes locked like gun-sights,

we are thought-caught on awe, or fear,

knowing that to move

will erase any chance

of kindling the kinship of friendly fire.

A distant bark,

mist-thin,

grazes the wax of the moment

and horizontal fox

funnels into the hedge

like the last swig

of ginger beer.

AN OCEAN OF ORCA TEARS

Tahlequah corkscrews, throwing her belly to the light,

showing the sky her feat through the wobble of water;

she has made flesh and fin in the time the earth

has rolled around the sun.

Like spray from a whip, she spins out the little life – Tali –

tail first, a dark fizz of celebration exploding like her silent joy.

Parallel shadows, they are carbon copies, paper and ink,

swimming with magnetic hearts,

noses softly drilling the beginning of miles.

Thirty sleek minutes of nourishment, mimic, brushing,

no rush, eye to eye, knowing love before the stopped breath.

The tsunami of grief. Death.

The calf is limp, bent over her mother’s beak like a wilted stalk,

brined, dying, tail a broken arrowhead skimming the waves.

Tahlequah adorns herself with a Tali headdress,

hour upon hour, straining to keep it afloat,

as though it is made of flowers the water will brown.

For a thousand miles, death squats on her face, replaces

the horizon, the rise and fall of seventeen suns, the spill

of the milky moon, night after night after night.

The carcass rots as she carries it aloft, bearing it

like a saved gift.

She dives when it slides and sinks,

scoops the corpse like a haul of silver,

lifts it to the sun, maybe in prayer,

maybe to warm its blood.

She follows the pod, eyes pleading, as though a healer

will emerge, and they tip the body from whale to whale,

feeling the grief, sharing the load,

until she sheds the load.

She does not turn as it slips away,

submerges in her wake.

Waves swill the blemish of death from her skin;

it braids the tide of a far land,

but she bears the cliff fall of its weight.

Feels the density of emptiness,

pressing, pressing,

though she is now

wholly indiscernible

from the rest.

TITANIC…THE UNTHINKABLE

Like old bones slow-bathing

in the frozen ocean,

the icebergs ache. Creak-crack,

strain seeping from

cadaverous gums as they succumb

to brine-thick numb-hold,

unable to shift

as the sedate cinereal prow

cleaves crystalsplay.

Violins whine.

Funnels gasp their last

for past-present-future.

The wet burial

commences,

splicing ice-knives hull-hewing,

bodies spine-skating

on deck-polish, plunging

into the watersleet of a smashed star,

bloodcrawl blocking

glacier-blue veins, dragged

by rushing opulence:

candelabras snagging like dislocated antlers,

linen lifejackets,

drifting corpses.

Above, coloured lifeboats

sky-float…

strewn petals at a graveside.

My writing....

"The child in me has remained wide-eyed and wondrous, and, for a while, that unbridled imagination galloped me bareback into writing fiction for children; in fact, I always believed that writing children’s books was my calling… but then I became aware that poetry has been my perpetual, quiet soulmate, sitting beside me, gently cradling emotion, taking the weight of burden, processing my experiences and finding metaphor for those things too difficult or beautiful to articulate. What seems to characterise poets is that they think deeply and need to crystallise every forage into their psyche."

"I write a lot about myself, though I don’t think that’s obvious. I often find myself, too, in the shoes of others. Isn’t every poet an empath? Death seems to feature a lot in my poetry, perhaps because I have lost so many precious people. Poetry definitely helps me make sense of life, and I now think it’s my way of recording mine."

"The wider world has gradually made its way into my work, too. I never thought I’d be writing about animals, for instance, but they are fascinating in terms of their relationship with us and the planet. I now have themed folders for my poems to accommodate all the subjects I visit. Some topics I come back to again and again because they are important to me. I think that, bit by bit, everything I’ve ever thought about has become writing of sorts."

Helen Laycock,

September, 2025