Commended: Charlie Bush, with the poem Lay me where I am loved. Bury me where I learned to ride my bike.

Charlie Bush

Commended - 2025 Tower Poetry Prize, 'Roots'

Lay me where I am loved. Bury me where I learned to ride my bike. 

Let me die in a public park.

The stump legged pigeons peck me clean,

the svelt grey squirrels pickpocket my favourite pair of jeans.

Let the magpies borrow the buttons of my coat,

the soft, silent worms unravel, 

untangle the cords of my muscles. 

May the fungi suck the sin from my bones, 

the passers by say it seems I had a kind face, 

those who knew me say my soul was even kinder. 

Let me die knowing myself, 

rather than scrambling for the scraps 

that those around me drop.

Let me die with more of a backbone 

than the frantic radicle I now own. 

Let me lay on that teeming ground, 

in a scarf made of mychorrhizal love, 

with mycelial music murmuring 

in my unhearing ears, my unmoving mouth. 

Floss against my tea-stained teeth. 

Please tell me someone (something?) will cry,

come to whisper goodbye 

when inevitably - quite comprehensively - I die. 

And please tell me that death is like falling asleep, 

All vigils of wanderlust spent. 

Let Death carry me in their absent and ichorous arms, 

hum hymnal lullabies of life and lay me down 

in my flower bed, 

where the trees can swaddle my hypha-wrapped form, 

darn delicate constellations between my pores, 

each a first love's kiss-kiss-kiss with tongue

as they peel the rotted boards from

my body, a Theseus ship, 

and weave instead, starlight tapestry. 

Mummify me in strips. 

Thick as reverent scripture I will rest, 

cocooned, consumed, my spine one long taproot. 

Our Mother cannibalising me back to the womb. 

Let me rest in my caul, feed a thousand others 

with the cadaver I once filled with tintinnabulation, 

the corpse I once called mine.