Rain when it falls
on bracken silkily
is like a sea of sounds
and you are deep among them
so deep you cannot
fathom how you came
to be here far out
and given wholly up
to these sensations no
meaning offers itself
like a rule for reading
what is everywhere
and here you are in rain
cloaked in rain and breathing
it as in your first home

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Fiona Sampson MBE is a poet and writer, published in thirty-seven languages, who has received international prizes in the US, India, Macedonia and Bosnia. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she’s published twenty-seven books, received the Newdigate Prize, a Cholmondeley Award and numerous awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, the Society of Authors and Poetry Book Society, and twice been shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her new books are Lyric Cousins: musical form in poetry (EUP), the poetry collection The Catch (Penguin) (both 2016) and Limestone Country (Little Toller, May 2017)