#TheCodex – Jen Feroze

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Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two small sleep thieves, who inspire a lot of her poetry. A former Foyle Young Poet, her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Poetry Wales, Spelt, Atrium, Dust, Stanchion and Ekphrastic Review. She was a winner of the 2022/2023 Magma Editors’ Prize, and has guest edited anthologies for Black Bough Poetry and The Mum Poem Press. Her debut pamphlet, Tiny Bright Thorns, is forthcoming with Nine Pens. Find her on Twitter @jenlareine and on Instagram @the_colourofhope.

Sheltered
Adj: protected | ignorant

I’m thirty-six, in bed and reading
a book about birdsong.
Safe in my house of bricks,
I can only confidently pick out magpie, 
woodpigeon, crow. Earlier, in the park
I showed my son fallen leaves. Knew an oak 
thanks to its gifted acorns. Felt the shaking, 
resigned branches as the rest furzed into ‘trees’. 

Now I’m luxuriating under the nine-tog, adding
fingers of rain on glass to my favourite sounds. 
I’m forgetting sleeping bags sodden in shop doorways, 
bones clumped wet and chattering. 
I’m taking great gulping lungfuls of the world 
and scattering sticks and straw with every out breath. 

Letter To The King Of Glenkiln
After Henry Moore’s ‘King and Queen’

I used to think  
I would always know you best 
by the curves of your face, 
your touch behind 
closed doors.  

Time 
and the country’s weight 
have proved me wrong. 

Ours is a peculiar kind of intimacy. 

The rain has made a home in your hollows. 
I’ve learned to find pictures 
in the occasional dark billow of starlings.  
In our own way, 
we have each begun a slow, 
greenish silvering. 

Though we haven’t spoken in a long time, 
when a sudden barn owl dips 
pearl-bright 
across the dawn water, I could swear 
I feel you reaching for my hand.  

Enough

What if there had been no angry fling
out of the window? What if instead,
she had recognised what lay there – 
curled coffee dark and yet somehow shimmering?

She might have placed them reverently 
in one of her many unused jam jars 
(the plum harvest had been poor,
trees offering only sour, greenish fists).

Together they would have worked the damp soil,
planting each one deep and soft as prayer.
And overnight there would have been green shoots,
the beginnings of a rainbow of vegetables. 

They would have woken having rubbed away
some of their sharp edges, hearing the strains
of a distant harp and clouds hanging low, 
weighed down by the frustration of giants denied. 

What if she had embraced the trade he made
and its possibility of magic?
Would the ripening of this small patch of earth
be worth more than gold snatched from the sky?

Would she have seen that in his childlike faith
and fervour, his will to please her,
his small, grubby palms,
she had always had everything she needed?

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