Night Wood
as the night comes on
the woods idle
in their nomenclature
i peel open
silent amnion
where stars are clawed
from sand banks and
trees caul the sky
and then it comes
memorious
ten thousand years
ago
i wore birch leaves on my shoulders,
cupped my hands
drunk on sap,
one hundred thousand nightingales sang
a flurry
of ancestor voices
pressed into the sonnet
of an out breath
i make sound as grievers do
will my body into the resin of
barren pines
robe myself in this place just
to stay alive
to will the earth to carry
on, the birds to keep singing
* upon watching the short film, ‘the Nightingales Song’ by Sam Lee and Emergence Magazine
Jai Michelle Louissen is a Scottish writer, living in the Netherlands. With an education in literature and in systemic therapy, she likes to write about trauma and loss infused with Scottish landscapes, biophillic portals into protoceltic animist cultures or encounters in nature closer to home. Published most recently in Poetry Scotland, Dust, Acropolis Journal, Dreich and The Black Cat Poetry Press and is the author of two chapbooks. Her second ‘the weight of vapour’ was published in 2024 She is the EIC of a literary journal, The Winged Moon.