For the sixth event in the Wild Court Reading Series, and the first of 2026, we are delighted to welcome acclaimed poet, editor, translator and activist Stephen Watts.
Stephen will be reading and in conversation with T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet and King’s College London lecturer, Anthony Joseph. The event takes place on KCL’s Strand Campus, London, from 6pm on Tuesday 24th March. Click here for more details and to reserve your free tickets.
Ahead of the event, we feature two poems by Stephen below. Both are from Journeys Across Breath: Poems 1975-2005 (Prototype Publishing, 2022; reprinted 2025).
How To Describe A Tree At Night
To stand under a circle of trees.
To stand beneath the infinite al-gebr of dreams.
To be spiked on the logic of failure & of loss.
Leaves brush my face as I pass on inwards.
Trees are like inverted lungs & I breathe in.
Traffic is like a procession of ants – but without
ants’ purpose.
The shrieks of geese, the calligraphy of branches,
white writing against the sky.
The slight falling in of dead leaves in spring.
I stand under a circle of trees & breathe with
the lungs of the earth.
For how much longer will this last ?
Is this how I can best describe a tree at night ?
As if I stand in front of
Foxgloves & they are taller than myself. Yes.
This is my body. Yes. The one that is dissolved
in sap. Yes.
This is my heart growing from inscribed valves.
And I should watch the kaleidoscope of wind-
migrated leaves.
And I should reckon on the silence of my mouth
of rooted speech.
But Now I Live On A Sorrowful Planet
‘But now I live on a sorrowful planet’
— Frida Kahlo
I should have worked as a porter in a remote hotel
or at the night-desk of a dour metropolitan hospital
I should have driven lorries before dawn down the
arteries of a weeping city
I should have handled tube trains into stations like
squealing pigs
I should have worked in a laundry or navvied it as
the foreman of a brickies’ troupe,
I should have been a laughter-clown or trapezed my
life up your wide sistering streets.
Ah, but for now I just live on a sorrowful planet !
I should have got up before dawn and gone to the
mosque, to the women’s entrance,
being a woman,
I should have portered in hospitals or given singing
lessons in Oncology,
I should have run backwards up moorland meadows
and gone raving over the blackberry
hill,
I should have closed my eyes in the face of oncoming
tides, in the face of the patinas of
‘no’,
I should have tautened my nerves on the rage of
exhausted ligaments,
I should have belly-danced under g-nomes or taken
the cholesterol count of stem cells.
I should have looked at myself in the eyes of a monkey,
in the eyes of a dog,
I should have tied yellow ribbons on walnut branches,
I should have let myself collapse in the apricot valleys
of the highest sierras –
Ah, but I did none of these things, I painted the sun
as source of all energies, the rampant goddess
as swirl of life, the dog of my dreams,
the snake of all breath