When it rains in the Forest, Zakiya Mckenzie

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Rain is not sadness
It’s falling does not send me to sorrow
Instead I welcome the washing away
Wrought by the fresh forest shower

Its thrashing is a mother's womb
It is heartbeat and pitter-patter
In this safe place, cocooned
To be wet makes it no lesser

She checked to see what time it was. Looking up at the sun, she smiled because the rainclouds that had splashed the morning seemed to have moved on.

A cobalt sky blanketed the morning and pockets of hazy sunshine beamed through morphing openings in the canopy high.

“Mining has been around since time out of mind,” I am told my Deputy Gaveller Dan Howell.

Writing in the forest is affirming. It owes me nothing and didn’t ask me to say these things

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