Artless

The book I’d like to read has not been written;
The tune I want to hear has not been played.
No painting is precisely as I’d wish it;
My perfect movie is, as yet, unmade.
What song would soothe my ear now, there’s no telling;
No architect’s creation holds my gaze;
I fear my feet would find no fun in dancing;
No appetite for even Shakespeare’s plays.
And what of my own kindred: do the poets
Have powers to aid me in these fevered times?
Perhaps I might discover some great secret
Concealed in their cadences and rhymes.
For poets speak of love and truth and beauty;
Show us a new and grand reality.
A vision of a world unspoiled, unburdened;
Not as it is, but as it ought to be.
And yet I see no promise of redemption:
All things are tainted by the touch of hands
Intent on harm and hurt; no thought of making
But only breaking, ruining our lands.
And there’s no comfort in the old religions
No hope in our so-called democracy:
And even at the bottom of a bottle
There’s no long-term solution I can see.
So I will go out early in the morning
Ride through the country, where I hope to find
A truth no human art has yet imparted
To my world-weary heart and troubled mind.

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in mundo inter mundos

A drowsing acre of rough-cut grass
walled off from the waking world.
Beneath pale stones, splashed with flowers
the founding generations mingle,
one with their home ground,
as their crisply chiselled names
bookended with joy and mourning
slowly soften with the seasons.

Spinning down to this quiet corner
from the village on the hill –
the home I left long years ago –
I find myself among old friends
see more familiar faces here than there;
my past interred in ordered rows.
And so I turn back to the road;
my world between two worlds.

Vulpine

By field and farmyard
Shaw, copse and spinney
Bridleway and holloway
I am Fox.

By garden and playground
Twitten and cul-de-sac
Bypass and underpass
I am Fox.

By seeking and scavenging
Raiding and thieving
Nourished and famished
I am Fox.

By swiftness and subtlety
Stealthy and shadowy
Running and cunning
I am Fox.

By covert and country
Hounds, horn and hunters
Followed and swallowed
I am Fox.

By midnight and daylight
Highways and byways
Glances and chances
I am Fox.

By legend and fable
Knowledge and hearsay
Neighbour and stranger
I am Fox.

By adapting and enduring
Shifting and drifting
Thriving and surviving
I am Fox.

Outlook

My father mentioned
once, apropos of nothing,
that in this place
he’d lived in thirty years
this view
was his favourite.

Over the churchyard wall
across five miles of fields and hedges
trees so dense no house or road breaks in
and ending in a high green hill
its slopes soft now but ever scarred
by centuries of working.

And still, we never sat, we two
on this old weathered bench
warmed by an autumn sun
and gazed on it together.
And now, I think, perhaps
we never will.

Equinox

A radiant rising
In readiness for a gilded mourning.

For a fraction of a fraction of a second
Night and day will stand

Precisely aligned
Perfectly opposed;

The season a bright gold penny
Balanced on its edge.

And in the fraction of a fraction that follows
We start the long drop into dark

From which we wonder
If we will ever emerge

And if we do
What kind of world we’ll find.

So I let our falling star
Copperplate my limbs and face

Breathe the newly sharpened air
Allow myself one more glance back;

The last day of a summer
That never truly was.

Rewilding

To my left-brained
Scientifically-inclined
Critically-trained
Eye and mind

These fields should now
Be an abomination;
No discipline by plough
Or corrective cultivation.

A shameful parade
Of gleeful weeds appears;
Led by a brigade
Of over-eager volunteers.

But as I look around
All that I can see
Is my native ground
As it’s meant to be.

 

The fields close to our home have been left uncultivated this year and the weeds – and we – are making the most of it. As well as wheat plants seeded from the previous crop (known as volunteers) there’s an amazing profusion and diversity of wild plants that would normally be sprayed out of existence. We’ve followed the rewilding process right through the lockdown period (we’ve been allowed to go out for exercise) and it’s been fascinating and inspiring to watch. Sadly, all the plants, and their attendant birds and insects, are doomed, but not for reasons of husbandry: the entire farm is a development site and is slowly disappearing under what will eventually be 1,000 new houses. I studied agriculture at university years ago, and I still like to follow the rhythms and workings of the farming calendar. But this spring, I’ve learned I’m even happier seeing what Nature can do when left to her own devices. N.

Lines and sentences

 

We know what’s coming
From the pictographs and hammered posts;

Spray-painted warrants of execution;
Whole acres marked for death.

But who will tell the trees
Inform the flowers, tip off the birds and animals?

If I could, I’d pick them up
In my two hands, spirit them away

But I’m condemned to stand and watch
The steel blades bite, the heavy wheels shake the earth

See all I’ve know and come to love
Torn up, despoiled and thrown aside

Entirely unconsoled by knowing
There was nothing I could have said or done.

A long road

 

My bicycle has brought me
Through country lanes, quiet woods
And up a short, steep hill
To this almost-forgotten church
Where the old dead dream deep
Beneath tumbled, lichened stones
Lost in drifts of summer flowers.

And I could be content
Were it not for knowing
Even this sublime machine
Will never bear me where I truly wish:
Back through years to times when we
Had seen and lived through none of this;
All things lay up ahead, yet to be.

So I must choose: inter all hope
To moulder like these ancient worthies;
Vainly seek a road that runs
Against the flow of Time;
Or climb on, breathe deep, look ahead
And take the onward way again
To all I fear, and cannot know.

Something in the air

Now the breeze brushes the barley
Sweeping through the crop like a cavalry charge;
Darkening the bright awns
Like velvet rubbed against the nap;

Then switches, swings, retreats in waves of pale gold;
All the field in motion, shaken by a hidden hand.
A power – all-present, fierce, unseen –
Swirling, sleepless, through the land.

Taken I

A faint breeze wafts the feathery tops
Of the grasses in the hayfield;
Soft, tawny with sun, downy with pollen.
Shut up safe all spring,
No hungry mouths to tear and chew,
No hard hooves to spoil and trample.
But soon the end will come
In the whine and slash of spinning steel
And thus laid low, all will be withered, gathered up,
Neatly compressed, and then consumed.