The hare

Gusts flood the moorside
flattening grasses.

A tussock blinks,
veined ears

catch our footsteps,
its heartbeat alert.

Through split-lips
it tastes the cluttered air –

sheep, marsh,
buzzard’s shadow.

Wired to leap, back paws
out-pacing the front

leaving a press of stalks and blades,
a furred print in the grit –

a whiplash of thinking
itself into another form.

 

First published in the author’s own collection, A Handful of Water (Cinnamon Press)

Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor. Cinnamon Press published her second poetry collection, A Handful of Water, in 2013. Her first novel, Liar Dice, won the Cinnamon Press Novel Award and her second, What the horses heard, was published in 2014. New poems have appeared in Prole, The Interpreter’s House and Lighthouse as well as Her Wings of Glass, the Exeter Poetry Festival anthology, the Battered Moons Competition pamphlet and The Broadsheet. Her website is rebeccagethin.wordpress.com.