Commended: Dawn Sands, Motorway Eden

Dawn Sands

Commended - 2025 Tower Poetry Prize, 'Roots'

Motorway Eden 

It is not illegal to play hide-and-seek in the grasses

at the edge of the motorway, soft verge soaked in

amber light. Through the glass I watch myself

unspool, a foetus by the roadside, suspended

in earth, like a dream. The placenta after

childbirth throbs its own heartbeat and splays like a bloody

Tree of Life.         If I were to guess where the Tree of Life

was located I would place it not by the motorway but in a glade

by the sea where a boy turned to me and said you’re a

bloody good climber for someone who’s only nine.

Eleven, Liam, elusive and mature, even swore without

flinching. The glade was behind an Esso garage and

was a secret. Years on, the trunks are charred and smeared

with bird slime and graffiti and three discarded

ropes swing from one branch, streams of blue ribbon

embalming umbilical roots. He pointed to a faint grey

shape across the bay and said look, there’s my house,

you can come round one day and perhaps it was cruel

that I believed him.          I have seen that glade washed

in so many shades of orange light, watched the city glistering

over the water, thought of them playing by the

roadside. It is not illegal to play hide-and-seek

in the grasses at the edge of the motorway. Also not

advisable. Last week I saw a deer bent on the kerb,

knees knocked straight like the barrel of a gun. Intestines

swarmed across the tarmac and I pictured the roots protruding

pustuled from the surface of the soil, a kind

of placenta, keeping something alive.