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The blue whale’s heart is a four-chambered car A zebra fish suffers a broken heart? He grows another while octopi, like queens, are blue-blooded with copper. Earthworms host five hearts; the cuttlefish, three. A bee’s heart runs down the length of one bee. A hibernating hedgehog’s heart beats five times to my minute’s seventy-two. Every beat rhymes. 14
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Naked Poem to Django Bennett-Clarke, a boy with Type 1 Diabetes from his friend, David, with Type 1 Diabetes In Edward’s Lane in Worcestershire, a green lane slunk across by Bow Brook. Despite being the swansong of an English summer, it was a puzzle to find a way across or in the hedgerow gain a path aground and through or over that slown ford. Your mum writes to me about the boy she adores: Django loves to run, full speed! When he feels himself going high he gets up and exercises around the sofa at breakneck speed, or around the garden, or down the hills, or bounces repeatedly on the bed coming up with ‘new groovy jumps’, the pump a part of his body. Godspeed and birdsong and tramping the Australian bush; waterfalls climbed at dawn solo, with a sugar rush; rain forests rent by the rattles of kookaburras; canopies cackling with rosellas... I flew home, my mind lit by the fling of lorikeets, puffed parrots, curled koalas, the flit and flirt of honeyeaters. Injections greet both dawn and dusk, and birdsong. Django, I have never felt less afraid. Of life. 15

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The blue whale’s heart is a four-chambered car A zebra fish suffers a broken heart? He grows another while octopi, like queens, are blue-blooded with copper.

Earthworms host five hearts; the cuttlefish, three. A bee’s heart runs down the length of one bee.

A hibernating hedgehog’s heart beats five times to my minute’s seventy-two. Every beat rhymes.

14

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