Alice Lyons

Two poems

The People Employed at the Organic Garden

emit rococo info
like foam from spittle bugs
amassing in crotches of heirloom arugula.

Pick runner beans in ricepaper light.
Plash beetroot in rain butts.
Flick dirt from purslane in polytunnels.

Virtuosi on fiddle.
Nuisance persons.
Possessors of willow knowhow

how to strip it and weave it.
(Okay a bit lax
on payment of car tax.)

Consider the impossibility of their employment
elsewhere, say Esquire’s, slinging lattés
wiping teak tabletops with Cillit Bang on a rag: no!

Resembling Siberian tomatoes
the people employed at the organic garden
germinate at low temperatures.

Their frilly minds are what Benoît Mandelbrot is on about
in a TED talk— the ineluctable
baroque of Romanesco broccoli.

There’s no broadband in the polytunnel.
It squats in Knockvicar a luminous plastic sun-
trap capturing sky, anarchy and rural-

living, recently blown-in jobbers
husbanding coriander
whose former lives in other locales

immolate in all-over lambency.
Whose fingers, releasing clods
of earth resemble salsify.

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