This is still from the poem Starfish. And in fact, I took more from the original poem in the opening. “Reeds speak to you of the natural world. They sing, they whisper”- those are all from the original poem, except for punctuation. In fact, I quite like the whole phrase together and was going to take that as my prompt at first before I realised it’s going to deadend me because I’m working off so much imagery from another person so I truncated it. And I still liked the resulting piece. The interesting thing about it is that I’m not really a naturalist though I’m a brownie, which is half a greenie for those who don’t know.
Reeds speak to you of the natural world. They sing, they whisper, they lament, they moan, they mourn.
Reeds speak to you of the natural world. Yes, those reeds by the roadside, that you thought were weeds. They do that. Why do you think they do all that? Human encroachment, of course. We tend to think the wild encroach on us but we also encroach on the wild, no? Perhaps we are much more of an encroachment issue to the wild than the other way around. What do you think?
The reeds whisper to you of the natural order. They whisper because they are tentative, timid, they don’t know whether you’ll listen or not. So they just want to dip their toes in a bit but no full commitments yet. This way they can pull back if they want. If they judge it right.
The reeds whisper to you of the natural order. They sing. They sing in celebration, in joy. It is their ritual, their sacred ritual.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 