Rosamund Taylor
The thumps, like someone putting up shelves,
have me scurrying down the hall. A starling
in my office somersaults into walls.
I open my windows as wide as they’ll go,
close the door. Lean against it, listening.
Nothing. Sound of my heart. A hush
in the air suggesting rain
so fine it barely glosses the bin lids.
All sorts of people believe
in god, people you don’t expect,
queer people, even – here I am saying queer
the way others might say upstanding citizen.
I don’t understand it. I’ve never looked
at a fuchsia in flower, say,
a fuchsia by the sea with two grey horses
grazing nearby in a too-green field, and thought,
Oh yes. God.
Radiator’s intestines gurgle. Mice
bustle in the attic. I can’t hear anything else.
Maybe the starling has already escaped,
seeing the corkscrew streets
from an angle I can’t imagine.
Rosamund Taylor’s debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection. In 2025, she published her novel-in-verse, Filly (Banshee Press), and won The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Poetry Prize.
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