top of page

"Lying Down and Looking Up"


Lying down and looking up

Underneath the hydro towers

dandelions splotch their leaves flat.

Their stems reach up to the lines

and hold the biggest little electric yellow sparks next to the Sun,

balance them there beneath the wires for a week.

Then each bulb turns into a cloud

that, attracted to the sky, lifts up on strong winds

higher than even the wires and then falls back down again

until raindrops shock each landed seed

into a slow moving lightning root

underneath the towers again.

Flowers made out of colours alternating green, yellow, grey,

directed from one horizon to the other in a line

marked out on the ground by metal flowers planted once

and only once.

 

Terry Trowbridge is a PhD student in Socio-Legal Studies at York University, Toronto. His poems have appeared in journals in England, the USA, and Canada, including Orbis, The Broadkill Review, Briarpatch, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, Untethered, American Mathematical Monthly, and many others. He has several chapbooks with Grey Borders Books.


Recent Posts

See All

Two poems by Xiadi Zhai

SEVEN-TEN SPLIT big strike gold rush & any second now it’s gonna kick in & down, torch red taillights through blinds which slice  across...

bottom of page