Anne M Carson – The unnatural forest

Carson LE P&W Vol 2 Nov-Dec 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025

The unnatural forest, poems by Anne M. Carson.


The unnatural forest

Solo silver foxes and arctic wolves surge forward
briefcases in hand, rippling the pack with suave

waves of motion. Thick coats, white
teeth. Wise not to get in their way. The young’uns

are sharp as sharks, massing in a great grey pod
pushing in sync towards the front, sleekly suited

rolling on their toes, bobbing and keen
for action. Others are decorous in navy, white-bibbed

like minkes, curious, communal, not pushing
themselves to the starting line. The rest of us

gather loosely in undifferentiated shoals behind
the pack, patient, moving aside en masse to let

the insistent ones through. A wild boar snuffles up
to me, hungry eyes, yellowed tusks.

I want to close my coat, step back. He smiles

but nothing reaches his eyes. I don’t want to get

close enough to smell his sweat or what he has
wallowed in or the rank odour of his breath.

 

With apologies to the animals for using them in describing 
(mostly) undesirable human traits experienced in airport queues.  

His thumbs prickle

Brother Cadfael
Chief Herbalist, Benedictine Abbey, Shrewsbury UK

Plenty of gruesome work for a herbal alchemist cum sleuth in the
crusade-ridden, barbarous 12th century. Brother Cadfael has discovered
his vocation in charge of the physic garden and distillery
of a thriving medieval Monastery. In good odour with his Abbott, he
has free rein outside Abbey walls to winkle out crime, his holy duty to
expose evil. Used to working with his hands, when criminals prowl
it’s his thumbs which prickle. He kneels on his ‘chair’, a prie-dieu
in his apothecary, surrounded by aromatics of drying herbs – yarrow,
comfrey, plantain – and the beakers and flasks of his trade, making
unguents and simples for townsfolk and monks alike. He doesn’t need
to be in Church to pray, nor does he need to be out of it to think through
clues which collar culprits. All is God’s good work. Perhaps, he says
having wished ardently and the thing accomplished, thought really
is prayer.

 

Based on the character created by Ellis Peters in The Second Chronicle of Brother Cadfael,
One Corpse Too Many, published 1979.


© Anne M Carson

Anne M Carson is an Australian independent researcher, creative writing teacher, poet, and essayist living by the bay on the unceded Country of the Bunurong people. Her poetry has been published internationally, and widely in Australia over many years, receiving numerous awards including being shortlisted in the Women Authors New South Wales Poetry Prize (2024) and commended in the Ada Cambridge Poetry award (2024). Her fifth poetry collection, George Sand (and Me): a poetic biography will be published by Rabbit Poets Series in 2026. Her PhD (2023, RMIT) received an Outstanding Dissertation Prize (American Educational Research Association, Visual and Performing Arts SIG, 2024).

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