Andrew Searle is a poet and queer activist living and working in Penryn, Cornwall. He is a practicing witch and is incredibly inspired by the Cornish landscape, community and folklore. A published poet and the Second Place Penryn Poet Laureate 2025, he writes poems that bring him closer to the beautiful place he lives and its rich history. Follow him on Instagram @a_ndi.s

Not England but it's Land

Andrew Searle

This country loves its marriages,

Its christenings too

Bells chiming across the patchworked land

A relic of English antiquity

But I long for the lost ones of Lyonnesse

Or, at least, its destructing waves

To bury this uncomformist guilt

This yearning for the harvest to be bountiful, not blessed

You are the byways that dissect this land,

Lines on a map, confined enclosures

I am the sprawling roots, unconstrained by petty borders

I am the wildness of the branches on the trees

You suppress me like the square form of lorries passing beneath

Trailing willows cut to right angles

Clearing paths of the blessed rot that feeds the forest

The crumbling wood that shelters runaways

St John’s Wort, summer’s flower, sun in the fields

All-consuming yellow, rape seed crops,

Sun on the hedgerows; poison in the fields

Like an afterimage, inescapable and half-bright

Bleeds into oil, sapling leaves, crimson pearls

Wild raspberry juice pooling on your fingertips

Pricked by the thorns, spat on by the Devil

The warmth of the sky tastes bitter on your tongue

The idea of halos comes from sunlight

From the spectrum of a prism

Light shining through falling water

Natural desire, pollen and nectar

The chattering and the babbling of the stream

Infinitely more tongues than you can speak in

Leave me without your misbegotten labels

Leave the water to form its own path

Through the forest

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