Elaine Ewart

Reading room

You are showing your American friend the crumbling coast
while I sit in the hunched chill of the Reading Room. 

The two of you are barefoot, treading secretive shingle,
soles sucked at, tugged by the tide. 

I read alone. The piles of requests fetched from
the stacks ebb and flow on the shelf. 

She is the one who led you into cougar country,
your back exposed to the cats stalking above,

your nape crisping electric.  Oh, that I
might lead you into danger, or you me.  

I am caressing the gloss of catalogue pages. 
In this picture I see, from behind, two figures  

as they look out, together, to a breaking ocean.
I want to take you back to the blood-sharp  

fen winters, the bite of bone on the river. 
As miles pass by, the rapt tension of  

our mirrored bodies will press
and shudder through our grasped hands.

Elaine Ewart is a writer and creative researcher interested in human relationship with place and with the rest of nature. She completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Essex in 2019, and her poems and essays have been published in various journals and anthologies, including New Welsh Reader, The Fenland Reed and Ink, Sweat and Tears.