Back in August 2023, we welcomed Kat Lyons, the current Bristol City Poet, to our Brentry Allotment. They joined one of our regular Tuesday sessions, meeting some of our wonderful participants and seeing some of the work we do there.
Kat wrote a poem about their experience, which can be read below.
It’s a beautifully evocative poem grounded in people, place and plants, capturing the intersection of memory, ageing, and the joy of gardening.
It’s rich in sensory detail and has a poignancy that is especially moving, spanning the bittersweetness of memory and the moments of tenderness and warmth our sessions are full of.
Recollected Moments in a Brentry Allotment
A wheelchair-friendly path; a shed; a space reclaimed
among dementia’s bindweed.
A bouquet of gardening gloves; each week she chooses
her favourite colour, periwinkle blue.
The smell of her first garden; a yellow tomato
plucked from the tangled growth of years.
Fingers planted in the soil; his hands unsteady now but quick
to part the leaves and find the early raspberries.
A dahlia like a ripe peach; her face lost
in sunset petals; a bright-eyed prayer of thanks.
Mouths folding into smiles; a nonsense song in Welsh, a poem
to wake the words laid sleeping on the tongue.
A great lion of a sunflower; a shaggy head
that nods a greeting, bows beneath the encroaching clouds.