for Helena Nelson

Let’s celebrate those seeded in guttering
high overhead — bird-dropped or wind-blown
in shy, shaded corners, not cluttering
the road-edge like litter or casually sown

on the garden’s margins. Buddleia, birch —
slender and whippy, fretful and restless,
only a small claw-hold on their high perch,
a loose version of themselves in endless

inventive air. No one, much, bothers them,
leaving their roots exploring the secret cracks
between bricks and flashing. Unless a stem
strangles a cable or a branch unpacks

some weathered pointing, troubling it, they’re safe:
every airhead, living only to dance
the delights of lightness, each sinuous waif
born from easy freedom, sun and rain and chance.

*****

D.A. Prince writes: “There’s a tradition of poets printing some of their work privately for circulation to friends. Now that Helena Nelson (aka HappenStance Press) is making more time for her own writing she has created a series of pamphlets about those unregarded — and usually unloved — plants generally dismissed as ‘weeds’, in which each is accorded its own sonnet. Richard Mabey’s Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants is the source for the botanical information while she brings a poet’s attention to what makes each one individual. She has sent these pamphlets to friends so, for the moment, only a few of us have seen them.

“I don’t habitually write poems dedicated to named people: this is, I think, the first time I’ve done it but I wanted to respond, as a way of thanking her both for long friendship and for all the poetic ongoings we’ve shared. I asked her, somewhat cautiously, if she’d agree to a dedication, then — later — if she’d agree to the poem appearing in a pamphlet.

“Her poems were sonnets so if I’d written a sonnet it could have looked competitive — and that wasn’t the point. Four quatrains, rhymed, seemed to suit the subject. In its original layout it appeared as a solid sixteen-line block but when we were working on the poems that make up my latest pamphlet (Continuous Present, New Walk Editions, 2025) Nick Everett, my editor, suggested that setting it in quatrains would suit the air and space those rooftop-rooted weeds have around them, and to my mind that’s lifted the poem in a way it needed. 

“As for gardening, I’m now very happy to let the weeds flourish.”

D.A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her first appearances in print were in the weekly competitions in The Spectator and New Statesman (which ceased its competitions in 2016) along with other outlets that hosted light verse. Something closer to ‘proper’ poetry followed (but running in parallel), with three pamphlets, followed by a full-length collection, Nearly the Happy Hour, from HappenStance Press in 2008. A second collection, Common Ground, (from the same publisher) followed in 2014 and this won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. HappenStance subsequently published her pamphlet Bookmarks in 2018, with a further full-length collection, The Bigger Picture, published in 2022. New Walk Editions published her latest pamphlet, Continuous Present, in 2025.

*****

Photo: “guttered” by bigbahookie is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.