The Sunday Poem: from a plane by Michael Pedersen

pool. pool. pool. stop counting. someone 

on a lilo in a pool with a cocktail island. 

what’s with all the lonely 

trees making bulls-eyes in the bellies 

of those neatly-hewn fields? bet 

something’s buried underneath. 

bet it’s matter: moribund & meaty,

gripped by the roots like an eagle 

clutches carrion. consider the look 

of happiness cast over that rabble 

of bricks & terracotta tiles: deluxe. 

i put on glasses only when flying 

over mountains: bespeckled peaks 

turn snow-topped & pouty, gradients

hard-wired from obsidian smur.

french alps/italian alps/swiss alps

– what matters is their alping. i’ve

gone gooey-eyed for how clever it is 

to live amongst those rocky sprawls,

a fingertip stretch from the dreaming. 

don’t want to hear about the zaggedy 

routes of hillocks dwellers, how they 

clamber above the truffle farmers & their

snout-mongering prisoners. higher even

than the old mushroom slinging hippy 

in the upper alpine swing, who has no 

hedgehog dilemma, no gravy tax; 

to whom the weather’s just the shadow 

of a cloud & lightning’s the harpoon 

of another realm’s corsair – ending life 

as unwittingly as a bear guzzles ants. 

running with a team of mountain goats, 

i’d conjure bawdy hot-takes 

on the ranks of stars, the astral cliques 

they join, jeopardise, jilt. 

makes me think of the people i’ll kiss 

for the first time on the forehead 

as they’re dying. all the many dead 

that would be with me in the treetops 

having chosen to become birds. 

i’d live right there i bleet 

to a disinterested passenger, just like that, 

until ready to landslide back down

yapping like a dog that’s lost 

the ball it’s been chasing,

as if i hadn’t been gone an aeon, 

as if this wasn’t the beginning 

of a new dawn.

Michael Pedersen is a Scottish poet, novelist and the Edinburgh makar (poet laureate). His books include Muckle Flugga (Faber) and The Cat Prince & Other Poems (Little, Brown)

Illustration by Chris Riddell