Poisons

The queen of poisons. She has never pretended to be anything else.

The finest charcoal for the finest powder. A quiet tree with explosive associations.

The beautiful lady who grants visions — and silence.

The berries taste of what they are: a little sweet, then bitter, then worse.

The brightest berries in the winter hedge. Every one of them a warning.

It does not grant visions. It takes you somewhere and leaves you there.

It has no smell of danger. No bitter taste. No warning at all.

Pure white, pure silent, pure lethal. An angel of the most literal kind.

Saint Anthony's Fire: the burning, the visions, the amputated limbs, the dancing plague.

The heart that heals you can also be the hand that stops yours.

It smells of mice and cold stone. It grows where the dead have been.

The smell of it alone is a warning. Few plants are this honest.

Four leaves, four petals, four sepals, one dark berry — and a symmetry that unsettles.

The undying king. Red berries in December. The tree that was here before Christmas arrived.

It silences dogs. The name is a specific claim, not a metaphor.

Beggars blistered themselves with it and held out the wounds for pennies.

The sweetest smell in the woodland. The most dangerous thing in the garden.

Cuckoo pint. Wake robin. The names are all innuendo and none of them are wrong.

A root that screams, a root that heals — sometimes the same root.

It flowers in autumn with no leaves, no stem, no context — as if arriving from somewhere else entirely.

Beautiful beyond measure, lethal beyond doubt, it asks nothing of you.

Lethal to horses. Essential to everything else. The conflict is not resolvable.

Pink and orange in October. The most dangerous colours in the hedge.

Evergreen in midwinter. Fragrant in January. Poisonous always.

Not a sedative. Not a philosopher's death. Convulsions within the hour.

England's mandrake: a pale root shaped like a man, and no less dangerous.

It was old before the church was built around it. It will be here after.