The Clocaenog Red Squirrel Trust has collaborated with eco-poet Diana Sanders to highlight the challenges facing Clocaenog’s endangered red squirrels through poetry. Eco-poetry blends creative expression with environmental activism, offering a powerful way to engage people with issues such as habitat loss, noise pollution, disease from grey squirrels, and the wider vulnerability of this rare Welsh species. Through these poems, Caro Collingwood (Red Squirrel Ranger) and Diana hope to inspire greater awareness and support for red squirrel conservation.
Each week we’ll be featuring one of the poems written in Diana’s workshop.
The correct way to meet a red squirrel by Rhiannon Rual
Alisander
Brought here by the Romans
Is now a green native
Salsa-seeded aromatic
For those in the know
As for wild garlic
A farmers’ market staple
It hangs its star-studded flowers
In pungent profusion
Far from gastropub reach
So far so familiar
But you need to chance further
Take a turn from the tracks
Set forth into frenemy country
Where the roots of otherness run
Deep
Where the trees whisper
Among themselves
Their long-held beliefs
Sharing without caring
Keeping their community of fungi
Close
Walk till you feel under the scrutiny
Of wide-eyed indifference
And a broken twig alarms the air
That’s when you freeze and they scurry
A red shake in a tall tree
And for as long as it takes
A pinecone to fall
Or the hush to return
You’ll feel part of the forest
Therefore
Free
