Eleanor J Vale has had poems published in magazines and anthologies, and won prizes in the Grey Hen (2019) and George Crabbe competitions (2021, 2023). Her pamphlet Think of Something Else was published by the Garlic Press in 2016.
Mushrooming
We found our first beefsteak
growing at the base of an old oak.
Look, my daughter said, a fistulina hepatica.
Using her little hooked folding knife
she cut a discreet slice, laid it in her basket,
and later placed it on the bread board
where it wobbled, like a piece of liver,
edible, bleeding.
In another place, not so far from here,
families no longer forage:
their children have been called away
to fight, and the woods they loved
to gather in are barbed wire fenced,
and mined.
Eleanor J Vale