If Someone Told Me on a Date That They Liked the Idea of Human Composting

I think I might fall in love.

I want to go the same way
as banana skins and potato peel. I want to be a bed
of wood chips, alfalfa and heat-loving
thermophilic microbes. I want to tell you the forecast
as a pine cone. I want to be a rose bush. I want to be
your oxygen.

Imagine such a lover. Who would fuck
like a life cycle, born and dying, born
and dying, messy and mucosal. Who would want
your undomesticated wilderness, full handfuls
of your hips. Who wouldn’t be afraid
to break down, to turn DNA into divinity.
Who, instead of fast cars and flash clothes, would give you
a single thimble of topsoil, teeming
with tiny organisms.

If you lost a lover like that, it would be a tree
falling where no one hears it but the whole ground
shakes. You would need to take rubbings
of their fingerprints to remember how it felt
to be embraced by the romance of a canopy.

This would be the lover who would lay down
their body to make new paths, leave their footprints
all over you without weight, say they’ve seen God
while gardening, then offer you flowers from their eyes,
know how to give back all that they took.

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Freya Bantiff won the New Poets Prize2023, placed third in the National Poetry Competition 2022 and was highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2022. She was joint-winner of the 2022 Bridport PoetryPrize (18-25s) (highly commended overall) and winner of the Canterbury Poet of the Year competition 2021. She was longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2022, won second prize in the Bedford Poetry Competition 2021, and was winner of the Walter Swan Poetry Prize (for 18-25s) in 2020, as well as theTimothy Corsellis Poetry Prize in 2017.