Hannah Linden
Only special places have dandelions growing between cracks in the pavement. The kind of places that leave the holes in the windows to let in the light. Someone was playing with a ball or measuring the weight of abandoned ball-bearings. They didn’t throw away the old piece of rope coiled in the corner under a pile of splintered wood.
Children will be here soon and they will skip, twenty at a time in unison. The older kids will hoist that rope into the nearest thing to a rainbow. And little children will be lying on their bellies blowing at the puff-white of the dandelions making wishes, leaping up to catch the sugars on their tongues.
Hannah Linden won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, 2nd Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024 and other prizes. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. BlueSky (@hannahl1n).
Briefly Write 