Sunflowers
Never bring inside what belongs outside.
Two days in, the meat-heads putrefy
and the studio thickens
with the seepage of plant matter and oils. Sweat
ripens the fibres of a shirt and the vision
contracts to permit only
yellow yellow
yellow (happy colour!)
and the big buds loom
and the brute stalks fester in the urn.
Rebecca Watts’s debut poetry collection, The Met Office Advises Caution, was published by Carcanet in 2016. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, it featured in the Guardian and Financial Times ‘Best Books of 2016’ lists and was also shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Rebecca lives in Cambridge, where she works in a library and as a freelance editor.