Zaffar Kunial

So this is my book, England's Green.

And I kind of feel that my ears are still popping from the plane journey.

And the green feels very at home here, but I'm not sure about the word England.

But hopefully, as you'll see, it's a kind of inner place as the book goes on.

And it's a complicated green as well.

And one of the complications is I have some Irish ancestry, which I mention in the book.

You've probably guessed that by now, just looking at me.

So this poem is called Foxglove Country, and it's the first poem in England's green.

And it's partly about the word foxglove.

Sometimes I like to hide in the word foxgloves, in the middle of foxgloves.

The is hard to say out of the England of its harboring word.

Alone it becomes a small tangle, a witch's thimble,

Hard to toll bell.

Elvish door to a door.

Ex-glo.

A place with a locked beginning.

Then a snag.

A glo.

Like the little Englands of my grief.

a knotted dark that locks light in glisten glow glint gleam and oberon's banks of eglantine which closes in on the opening of gulliver whose shrunken gull says rose in my fatherland