Work in partnership with us to tackle the challenges of congestion, air pollution, physical inactivity, and social inequality, by making it easier for people to walk and cycle.
For professionalsYour support helps to give children access to the training and equipment they need to ride a bike safely - starting a cycle of good that can go on to benefit their health, education and future.
Get involvedHere, I am listening.
Once precisely engineered
and now, cracked to my aggregate:
I can still hear
everything.
Grass rubbing the air.
Ten yards away, a tiger beetle
sausaging eggs from its rear. Someone’s name
in the next town, tossed up like a coin.
Your shoes, breathing.
See the horizon?
I can hear that fold of sea
all the way to France; and when it arrives,
tune my sense to the precise note
of a single shell that rattles under its flop.
And each thing, being listened to,
listens back.
A dark bedroom, an imagined step -
each thing, being listened to,
hushes.
The wind drops.
A dandelion resists the urge to seed,
cradles the huge sound of its genes leaving.
A muscle unfurling its oily foot towards a groyne
plays dead.
A woman breaking bread in St-Nazaire
stills herself with a sixth sense.
I burrow beneath her held breath,
seek the constriction of fibres in her chest,
their lock trembling high as a telephone wire.
Yes, I can still hear everything,
and I assure you, everything is quiet as the grave.
But put your ear to mine and you will hear
the molecular stretch of lichen growing
cell by cell.
— Ros Barber