THE WINGED MOON
NATASHA GAUTHIER
Bee-high
Can we remember
being bee-high?
A Stonehenge of adults
whistling above our heads?
It is good to shrink again
crouch to the cookstove dirt
become a hunchback spoon
sunk into the June heat.
Abandon the vast forest,
leave the mountains to giants,
crawl inside the amphitheater
of seedpod and shell
where knapweed is a theremin
strummed by bumblebees
wrens crochet opera
and jadestone aphids praise
the extravagant competence
of a single shrub rose.
Natasha Gauthier is a Canadian poet and journalist living in Cardiff. She is the winner of the 2025 Borzello Trust/New Welsh Review Poetry Prize and placed first in the 2025 Poetry Wales Awards. Her debut collection will be published next year by Parthian Books. She was both runner-up and highly commended in the 2025 Wirral Poetry Festival Competition, and was nominated for the 2025 Forward Prize for best single poem. She is part of the 2024-25 Representing Wales cohort, Literature Wales' development programme for under-represented writers, where she is mentored by Damian Walford Davies. Her poems have been published in the anthology Afonydd: Poems for Welsh Rivers (Arachne Press), Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, Scintilla and Ink, Sweat and Tears, among others. Natasha runs Tiger Bay Poetry, Cardiff's premiere monthly series of poetry readings.