Building Site Poem by Zoë Skoulding

Between the buildings
trees reach down
to languages
of soil and worms,
leaves gloss argots of glass and steel;
woods lie down on floors
to bounce back
every word, every word
you speak
with the long
echo of your footsteps down into the mud.

In simultaneous decay and growth
this maze of streets and squares
puts down its roots,
unsettling the ground
with every new inflection, every
demolition: first the trees, then the wooden
houses, bricks, the broken concrete.
Look,
now you can see in the ruins how
buildings took hold and pushed up
through your bones, rubble, walls of earth,
this tangle of useless pipes.