I sit beneath summer’s kiss and have death recall the light.

The grass still warm, fingers grazing each blade like promises

I can’t keep. A storm waits beyond the sky,

throbbing like a pulse I’ve grown too used to ignoring.

The horizon is an old argument, pulling me towards its edges

as if daring me to fall. There is a rook nearby,

silent and watching, its wings stretched wide enough

to carry the weight of something nameless.

I’ve been here before, in the lull between sun and dusk,

where shadows slip like memories forgotten too soon.

I used to think I could make the earth remember me,

make it want me to stay.

But the sun burns, relentless.

I taste salt on my lips—sweat or tears, it hardly matters.

Summer has its own hunger,

pulling at the marrow, asking for more than I have to give.

I know the sound of my own leaving,

the way it thrums in my chest like a song only half-sung.

I’ve seen the way heat blurs the lines of a road,

how it bends the truth into something easier to swallow.

There’s a body lying on the other side of the sun,

and it looks like mine,

though I haven’t touched it yet.

The wind shifts, sharp as a knife through honey.

I should rise—

should shake off the dirty clinging to my skin like memory,

but I stay, I wait. The rook calls out,

and I answer with silence,

with a stillness I no longer recognise.

For once, death can wait.

Summer swallows me whole,

and I let it.

Judges’ comments: A summer poem, equally concerned with memories, bodies and climate change, perhaps even an unfulfilled relationship? It contains some memorable lines, like "Summer has its own hunger,/ pulling at the marrow, asking for more than I have to give."