Whiteway
The land is dreaming again,
white as a thin shelled egg,
cloud shoulder, quickthorn, stone axe.
Ancient woman with cargo of salt.
Not bleached or alabaster, not
ivory or ashen, pearly, pure or ice.
But white as mycelium strands
digging at limestone
to make a road on the ridge.
The land says listen and merge,
like ammonite held in oolite.
How rock wants a wet body to make fossil.
Such are the things we’ve forgotten,
adrift from the otherworld
of mole, cave, worm.
Whiteway’s memories of kin —
a sinuous line that pulls us back, dwells
in our unions and uncertainties.
To be with the season,
dream the road, says the land.
Walk us back to ourselves.
First published in Modron Magazine, 2024
Late Warning
In the dream zone of winter
scarlet elf cups are scanning the future,
acoustic mirrors funnelling soundwaves
into the drum of the earth’s core.
They hold all forms of time at once,
remembrance and discovery,
a kingdom clustered
in the temporal bowl of now.
Triggered by a change in temperature,
these feeders on the dead, these doulas
of spring, shoot into the air,
sporulating throats of fresh cells
as if life could be
infinite and bulbs could be rubbed
for the green cries
of ramson, cuckoo pint, snowdrop.
Who knows what they know
of separation. They call to us —
come closer. Through
the white noise of wind and traffic, lean
into the crucible. Dissolve
your fleshy borders —
feel after the fire,
how blissful the forest.
First published in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, 2025
JLM Morton’s poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia and The London Magazine. She is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer, Laurie Lee and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and was highly commended by the Forward Prizes. Her debut poetry collection is Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Borrowed Ground (2026) is her second collection, one which ‘holds beauty and brutality in the same frame, insisting that attention is not innocence, but a form of witness’ (Poetry Book Society).