6am, when no one's there

I design parks and urban green spaces in Ghent, which involves a great deal of planning documents and stakeholder consultations and phased implementation timelines. The parks I plan are social spaces, intended for use, filled with people during the hours they're open. I go to them at six in the morning when they're empty. The emptiness is what I write about. Not absence as melancholy, but the park as a thing that exists independently of its function, the way the grass flattens overnight and the birch trees do exactly what they were going to do regardless. I design for human use and then I watch what happens when humans aren't there, and the gap between those two is where the poems come from. I've been a landscape architect for twelve years and writing for three. The poems are short and concrete and concerned with ground, with things that grow in soil that has been disturbed and then left. One of my current obsessions is the Rabot neighbourhood, a part of Ghent that was heavily industrialised and is now in transition, and the specific flora that colonises vacant lots, which is stranger and more interesting than anything I would specify in a planting plan. Willowherb on railway sidings. Buddleia in wall joints. I write about those things because they are genuinely beautiful and because nobody planned them.