Title: Urban Rainforest
Medium: Photo
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My lover gave me green leaves
with the mud of the garden on them,
radishes sharp and red,
nasturtium flames.

He gave me the tender heart
of a cabbage, its glossy coat,
a loaf of bread studded deep
with seeds.

He gave me the note
the blackbird
I’d cried at the blackness of
by the river sang.

He gave me the struck fire
of the thoughts
in his mind—
flint on flint.

He gave me the taste,
direct on his tongue,
of the syllables their embers
did not destroy.

He gave me his word,
the word of an Adam—
a promise,
should he set eyes on the sun.

He gave me a drop of the dew
to hold.
To see my face in it.
To look through.

He gave me,
in the chrisomed palm
of his empty hand—
a gasp of joy.

My Lover Gave Me Green Leaves by Josephine Dickinson

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Josephine Dickinson was born in London. Following a childhood illness, she became profoundly deaf overnight at the age of six. She read Classics at Oxford then taught music whilst beginning to publish poems and develop a career as a composer under the tutelage of Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett and others. Following a period as a community arts development worker in London she moved, in 1994, to Alston, a remote town high in the Cumbrian Pennines. There she met and married a retired farmer, who died in 2004. Her first UK book, Scarberry Hill, was published by The Rialto in 2001 and her second, The Voice, by Flambard in 2004. Silence Fell, published by Houghton Mifflin on March 12th, 2007, is her US debut, and contains new poems and a selection from her first two books, arranged in the form of a modern day shepherd’s calendar, around the twelve months of the year.