Alyson Hallett

2063

We didn’t take babies to work because babies were work
like any other kind of work.

Sex work, engineering work, food preparation work,
artist work, nurse work.

In meetings babies kept things real.
Focused. Full of humour and soft milky burps.

We loved our books. Spells. Grammar.
The shape of a letter on a page,

the way words conjured
circles and non binary universes

that laughed yesterday
at tomorrow’s joke.

We buried precious stones
in the Earth and learned the value

of pebbles. Their soft light
and cries were visible, audible, inescapable —

we held them in our hands
and they held us to the rules of the contract.

Alyson Hallett's latest book is Stone Talks: a book about her work with migrating stones published by Triarchy Press. Close on its heels is a co-authored book of poems with Penelope Shuttle, LZRD, poems from the Lizard Peninsula. Alyson lives in Somerset, loves to walk, dance, swim in the sea and play piano.