Sim Pereira-Madder

on arrival they set the great on fire

the bamboo and the climber
the bay tree and the rosebush
have taken over

we have a small orange mower
but we don't use it
so that the insects and the butterflies

can lead their own lives more fully
so that if we are using the garden furniture
it looks as if we are in nature

and if we are using the hammock
all the birds and other creatures
make us feel like we are natural ourselves

and that the sounds of the city traffic
the smells of it
the feeling of the city traffic

triangular on our skin
crystalline on our tongues
is only temporary

and will last only as long as one era lasts
or as long as one day does
or as long as god sees fit

or unlike anything else
any living thing
as long as we want it to last

in the small back garden of our
housing association flat where
we buried our third child

Sim Pereira-Madder is an emerging poet of mixed British/Brazilian heritage born and based in London. He is an alum of the Obsidian Foundation and of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective, an MA candidate at Poetry School, and a reader for The London Magazine. Among other places his work appears in Magma, Poetry London, Wet Grain, The London Magazine, and The Poetry Review.

Sim provided the following note about his poem:

How to address this subject matter without writing the often-reductive poetry of victimhood? ‘Death Styles’ by Joyelle McSweeney showed it could be done.

In the ninth and final stanza of ‘on arrival…’ an experience of miscarriage in the second trimester is referred to. By which point the question of the natural versus un-natural world has already been drawn into focus, as has the illusion of any sense of control over either of these worlds, particularly in the temporal sense. Things last as long as they last, it seems to say, and perhaps even in loss there is abundance.