Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025
The unnatural forest, poems by Anne M. Carson.
The unnatural forest
briefcases in hand, rippling the pack with suave
teeth. Wise not to get in their way. The young’uns
pushing in sync towards the front, sleekly suited
rolling on their toes, bobbing and keen
for action. Others are decorous in navy, white-bibbed
themselves to the starting line. The rest of us
the pack, patient, moving aside en masse to let
to me, hungry eyes, yellowed tusks.
I want to close my coat, step back. He smiles
wallowed in or the rank odour of his breath.
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