careful heap of fallen petals. All the same Distracted from 'self', set free to rhapsodize You think it really ought to last for ever. Lifting the camera, as if it were A sort of prayer But the language was an accident That happened somewhere in the creature's brain. Can you afford the planet? A jay can bury five thousand acorns in autumn. Somewhere inside this amiable jungle There waits a label not designed to be read. Here at the edge of what we almost know It flowers, as if in hiding. Together we have come To the edge of what we were saying Hung out in rows, like changeless blossom Against a sky whose blue Once made us intensely happy But noticed most when gone, Our words like scented gardens for the blind. ? John Welch has lived for the last forty years in east London, married to the painter Amanda Welch. He helped run the South Asian Literature Society, an organisation that promoted interest in the literatures of the Indian Subcontinent and worked with the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan, and more recently the Iraqi poet Abdulkarim Kasid, on the English versions of their poems. In 1984, Oxford University Press published his anthology Stories From South Asia . This body of experience contributed substantially to his previous Shearsman collection Visiting Exile , published in 2009. Other work: Collected Poems (2008) and Dreaming Arrival (2008), personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of the experience of psychoanalysis .