This cento can be attributed in its entirety to Jane Clarke’s When the Tree Falls

A Sunday evening in January.
Back when his palms,
coaxed with tenderness, were as
dark as a night without stars.
Every family has stories, left like ploughs
fifty-odd miles from home.
God and religion
had scorched a new place to hide.
It happened quickly in the end:
just my father and me, watching
kits playing in the scutch grass,
laying our tools aside.
My mother said she’d already asked him –
notebook open on the kitchen table – for stories
of the hospital, of night nursing, of
paper-thin skin. Just my father and me,
quiet except for the engine’s hum. There was a
root deep down, entangled, but in his
silence I heard a scythe.
To find the words he had to pull
up the headstones, weed the gravel, nick the
vein in his arm. He said he used to bite his lip
when he began to dig, worrying where to put the first
X. In the afterwards my mother unsheathed the splintered
yard brush, swept up seeds, runners, white rhizomes and
zipped us all together, praying for the weather to hold.

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Caitlin Tina Jones is a third-year Creative Writing student and emerging poet from Hengoed, South Wales. Her poems have been published by The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network, Poetry Wales, and Propel. Her poems have also featured in various anthologies, including He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan) and Beyond/Tu Hwnt: Anthology of Welsh D/deaf and Disabled Writers (Lucent Dreaming). She is currently working with Edge Hill University as a Lived Experience Consultant on Arts4Us, a £2.5m research project using creative solutions to alleviate stress from children and young adults with mental health struggles.