Sue Hardy-Dawson (besides being a lovely, lovely person and my dear friend), is a Yorkshire born poet, artist, and illustrator, and is widely published in children’s poetry anthologies. She enjoys visiting schools and has provided workshops for the Prince of Wales Foundation for Children and the Arts. Being dyslexic she takes a special interest in encouraging reluctant readers and writers. Her first solo collection, of illustrated poems, Where Zebras Go (Otter-Barry Books) was long-listed for the North Somerset Teachers’ 2017 Book Award and shortlisted for the CLiPPA 2018. Sue has a new collection of shape poems, Apes to Zebras (Bloomsbury) with Roger Stevens and Liz Brownlee, and her second solo collection If I Were Other than Myself (Troika) is due out soon!
The Listening
Somewhere inside rock, tree and root
Earth knows the truth about everything
her own truth
of scents, still sounds
where mole and eagle go
one brushing darkness, the other a sky mouth
her words are water and wind,
creeping frosts, a cool dawn trickling
over mountains
she may shout storms
out at sea breaking coasts
or simmer with sulking fogs choking lanes
but her bones are molten
and her flesh loam, just as her words
are glass runes
on rainbows. She
speaks her truths to the sun
and moon: if you put your ear against soil and stone
you can listen to her warm heart beating
hear the sound of our Earth Mother weeping
© Sue Hardy-Dawson
Thanks, Sue, for this wonderful poem.
A Chinese dragon on a wall at the Haikou Yazhou Gu Cheng, Hainan, China, by Anna Frodesiak.
