Ben Wilkinson: Featured Poet

This one will grow out of the earth
with enough water and topsoil, easily,
even if the loam is stone-ridden

or lies directly above a plane of bedrock.
Slowly, after the seed has been planted
a good four or five inches below ground

(it being stunted and useless if started off
a potted plant), the embryo splits open
as if a dinosaur egg, a stem shooting up and out

soon after, like some crazed burrowing snake,
roots embedding themselves as tens of octopus
tentacles, a cloud of sperm desperately seeking out

nurture, minerals, moisture. The leaves, however,
are the most spectacular: a dense green as deep
as the fathomless Atlantic, veins as chunky

in width as human arteries, red as the glitter
backed bugs crawling about its ever-widening
surface. You fetch shears, pruning tools,

to no avail, no use: no secateurs would ever
cut through the thickness of its arm-size
branches now, its trunk two fat men wide,

so large the lawn beyond the base
has risen several inches, plants either side
withered or died; disappeared without trace.

One day, you awake to hear its brushwood
tapping at the window; the garden, by now,
an unsaveable jungle, and know

that though an axe wedged in its fat gut
might just kill it off for good, its beauty and presence
is too much, even with next door’s fence

bodged, hanging on in cliff-edged desperation,
half the greenhouse windows smashed, the bulbous
tomatoes angry at their stations, lopsided and helplessly deshelved.