Congratulations to our poet Lesley Saunders who has won the National Trust’s Landline Competition with her poem Leaf Goddess.

Leaf Goddess

The question of bracelets is the one about
nakedness and what makes it, how her bare

arm has just brushed against the whale-back
of sky lying against the slow length of her

after all its migrations and tornadoes.
She imagines practising her feldenkrais

on its tired atmospheres, the inert gases
rippling like glass-eels under her fingers

while she becomes leaf-throat, leaf-speckle,
a tease of beetle-wings and copper beech,

a birds’-nest of precious-metal puffballs
and chlorophylls. Inevitable then that winter

is what she does best, the meaning
of which is resting roof-deep in leaf-lustre,

naked. Staying. Stayed.