Earth-bound by Rosemary Badcoe

Earth-bound

Tonight we’re waxing gibbous, giddy
with our arms out-flung in late-night light from stores
that stock their windows high. We sow distraction,
lope in doorways, carve our immortality
in bus shelters and benches. Here’s where hares
shovelled starlight on the recreation ground,
the mound like broken glass flinging reflections of our feet
up to a sky boxed in by banks of tenements.

Like leverets we’re born in shallow scrapes, eyes wide –
no chance to set a burrow where there’s space to grow.
We sling the stones that burst the lighted panes.
The hares pursue the moon into the sky
and squat there, pestles pounding rice cakes,
faces turned away.

by Rosemary Badcoe

Editor’s Note: The imagery in this loose sonnet is rife with surrealism. The slant rhymes lull the reader into a world that seems ordinary, but is ever so slightly unrecognizable.