Erica Hesketh

Alkanet (blue nettles)

We find them flourishing in the gap
– I want you to know that you don’t need

between the concrete paving and the railway tracks,
to gain some arbitrary level of proficiency before

 leaning out over the path in big armfuls. The leaves are
starting to experiment. You can make music

 pert and uniform, with whiskers along their edges;
with the smallest set of notes,

the flowers are the brightest blue, five round petals circling
a game with whatever is to hand…

a white, furry star. The wind moves them about, gently.
Imagination, flow, being-with:

We delight in calling out their names each time we pass by –
this is what I most want to nourish in you,

‘Watch out for the nettles!’ – even though they are
what I do not want any institution to trample,

not the stinging kind. My daughter will start school soon;
in the interests of ‘getting through the material’ –

 she is excited, and I am excited for her. It is hard
I suppose I have this growing feeling that life isn’t

 to look at the clustered flowers and not see little blue girls
just about getting through; I catch myself

lifting off from dozens of green diving boards…
holding on to the present moment so tightly –

Erica Hesketh is a poet and editor, originally from Japan and Denmark, now based in London. Her debut collection In the Lily Room was published by Nine Arches Press in 2025, and her pamphlet To an Unknown Receiver: Sonnets & Cascades will be published by Guillemot Press in June 2026. From 2016 to 2024 she was director of the Poetry Translation Centre, and she is currently artistic director of Winchester Poetry Festival.   

 Erica said this about her poem:

 This poem was inspired by a walk with my daughter. It uses a form called a coupling which was invented by Karen McCarthy Woolf. The roman and italicised texts can be read separately or together.