It's Still Life

A Journal of Thoughts from This Week

13 May – walking on Lower Lodge Gill, West Sussex

The flail mower growls through the lane—it’s a starved thing,
metal teeth gnashing cow parsley and nettles into pulp,
spitting out splinters, limbs, stalks and petals—
confetti—a wedding and war all at once.

Casualties counted in flashes of sight—
a shrew’s twitching hind leg,
featherless wings, torsos of nestlings,
the wing of a meadow brown butterfly glued to my leg,
a hollowed nest now just a wad of grass in the maw of it all—
and my jaw knots around the irony
that this is called verge management,
not annihilation,

as if brutality becomes bureaucracy
when given a warrant of maintenance.

The operator grins, waves,
deaf to the crunch of vertebrae under his wheels,
blind to the fact that he’s shaving the earth bald
in the name of tidiness—
that neatness is just violence with a clipboard.

My fingers dig into my palms,
crescent-moon scars blooming fresh
as I wonder if the bees will remember this massacre next spring,
or if they’ll hover over the stubble,
confused,
brushing against empty dirt
where elderberry once reigned white.

A clump of oxeye daisies, severed but not yet dead,
lie at my feet—
their roots dangling like frayed nerves—
and I think:

This is how the world ends—
not with fire,
but with a council worker who’s just following orders,
because they have access to a flail mower for two weeks.

And the worst part is
I can already feel the painting coming—
the one I don’t want to make—
where the flail’s shadow isn’t a shape at all,
but something
endlessly
swallowing.

---

Written with Denise’s Six Sentence Story in mind, which includes the word “warrant”. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.