Sue MacIntyre’s worked for many years in book publishing as an editor. Her debut poetry collection The Wind Today was published by Hearing Eye (2010). She has twice won first prize – for her poems ‘Deep Forest’ and ‘Ice Sculpture’ – in the Scintilla Open Poetry Competition. Earlier poems of hers were published in the pamphlet Picnic with Seafog and Elephants by The Many Press in 2003. Her Thumbprint pocket book Green City was published by Stonewood Press in 2016. Her latest full collection is The woman who couldn’t finish things (2021).
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from Green City
Wind in your near-black leaves,
solitary tree, in grey pavingnear the brick of Goswell Road –
hurtling from a Tuscan painting,dark tree in a honey-coloured land.
I’m still for a momentwaiting for the bus, fingering
your shining leaves, not farfrom the City. Tell me tree
where you came from –was it a blond landscape
outside city walls, werethe fields like knitted squares
on a steep hillside?
[…]
Swifts whistle in distant playgrounds
and in green sky catch flies at dusk,tilt in early morning so the sun
shines on their underwings,hold to their own hunting ground
below the far off pointsand trails of early morning planes,
above green bedding of the tops of trees,the city’s flashing skylights.
Whose unconcern for usrefreshes us, another space,
a space we’re not entangled with,whose far-off screams we listen for
looking upwards from the balconyat blankness after the first cold.
