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.
In the corner of my Eye by Diana Sanders
There is movement in the branches—
more of a flitting hope than an actual moment.
A flutter of Autumn colour just on the edge of being.
Rows of Sitka Spruce bring dark to light—
an army of forgotten warriors in fatigues of moss.
Since I was last here, root plates have been upturned
as if in worship to some Bronze Age God—
foxgloves beached like fishing boats
caught out by the tide.
A single oak stretches in a circle
of new light, I wash my face with water
from its rain-soaked leaves—
I wish it a long life and good health.
The rumble of wind turbines
masks songs of robins and goldcrests
but not the jays, dogs off the leash
or motorbikes from the B road.
I skip over blade shadows, like a game
I played in school, speeding up as the wind gusts.
And by the half-up, half-down drystone wall
I think of this island of trees girdled by upland pasture—
of red squirrels hemmed in by greys,
of times before coniferous plantations and forest raves
before the Victorians’ fervour for grey squirrels
when the reds were many—
now so few.
So small compared
to mountains
that clutter the horizon.
