New Boots and Pantisocracies website:

Postcards From Malthusia DAY ONE HUNDRED – Stephanie Green

(Craighouse, Edinburgh, June 2020)

Few people used to come here – the grounds

of the former lunatic asylum: joggers, the elderly

but they kept to the tarmac round the edge.

But now, as May turns into June, buttercups

like a bright lake darken with currents, trails

criss-crossing the expanse of unmown grass.

Let out for their allotted hour, small kids burst

into the open space – whooping and screaming,

running wild – their parents indulgent.

We tread our separate desires: the lonely,

longing for touch, keeping their distance as they pound

their griefs into the grass to the soil beneath

or let the eyes relax at the long views,

a respite from crouching over screens,

to the views of Arthur’s Seat or the Firth of Forth

where we cannot go, or even on the distant horizon,

when the haze clears, to the triangle of Berwick’s Law

where I have never desired to go, until now.

To see more poems chosen for this project, see Bill Herbert and Andy Jackson's New Boots and Pantisocracies