Goose grass, cow parsley, hog weed
Chasing away the bear leeks.
The verges are rising,
burning with ruderal Urtica
In the garden the borders are massing purple and white
Calm enough for bee business
They buzz sweet rocket, Centranthus, Euphorbia
While hawthorn foams at the shores of the meadow ocean
of dandelion ghosts and buttercup constellations
Red campion and bluebells
Nodding with the weight of spring spent
Cow parsley and freshly cut meadows
Bright and beautiful after cold rain yesterday
The sun flattens the greens
and washes out birdsong
A red kite clambers up through a thermal
to hang ‘M’ shaped and daubed with white
Distant pheasant
Proximal, sound from every tree
Blackbird looped trill and titter
Chippling chip and corkscrew chatter haha
Trill introduced comic tonal whistle
Beak acrobatics too fast for my brain
The colours are coming.
Allium hordes scuffling with tufted purple crew cuts
And Nectaroscordum unsheathing upturned chocolate crowns
Blues, white and piercing paeony pink
leaking pools of intense lemon Euphorbia
Shuttlecock ferns stretch furry coils like feathered ladders
Reaching for mossy trunks
The trees are leaved now
Though some still half naked
The apples in underwear, pink and white
Slowly dressing in light tender greens
On the secret side, in the old fishponds
A submarine pheasant nods through the deepening grass
Frothing with buttercups and cow parsley
And brave roses peep against the warm walls
Calm and Sunny
Great tit see saw
Jackdaw caw caw
Mossy apples like mediterranean olives
Their sunlit trunks become the stone walls beyond
A tufted beige bee sample buzzes
the Pulmonaria, fading in the sun
and two lovebirds Columba palumbus canoodle in the corner bamboo.
Freewheeling through icy downhill drizzle
Rivulets run left then right
A slow hill climb through banks of ramsons
to a ridgeway of hedges reclining to within an inch of their lives
Down again to brown water high and rushing
then up to sanctuary within the walls.
Sharp citrine cushions of Euphorbia
and Arisaema erecting canopies over grey freckled stems
A low carpet of green rises with fading chocolate hellebores and pinpoint periwinkle
Dark arms of jagged apples pucker lipstick buds in to life
And black capped jackdaws strutt and gather
bouncing ‘Tchack Tchack’
As a low fish pond meadow swells below
If sleep were to come here
I would turn my back
As the sun of tomorrow
Lies on it’s side and closes it’s eyes
To light shadow faces
Tracing sunken trunks and moss covered fissures
In this forest of the night.
Where the depths of the canopy drown decades of decayed wood
And we walk in the darkness, towards the light.
This forest of the night we must pass through
This surround of light
Drenched in darkness.
Sleep green in the forest
We’ll wake with the same sun
And take leave this evening
Wherever we’ve dreamed
With soft sinking steps
Friction froze slopes move to equilibrium
My shoes in litho-mineral liquid
I would happily sink in to it’s cold embrace
but I must select the stones
uniform and roundish, flat with an edge to grip
and throw down from the sloping tide peak
My fleeting contact
A rolling surge overtopped by a smooth constant rush of moon drawn peaks
Drawing clinker from the breathing beach
In hot luxury lie palatial plazas
And football pitch pools
Placing garden cut vistas
through the forest.
The forest of deer and martens
Now fenced in by traffic or death
Traffic that lives through the rain and the smell of freshly cut corn
Wet and dusty evaporating
in the sun like a grill iron
glowing with the wind.
Ruffling birches
take the rain away and sweet sounding Melun surprises
with high rise and low flow.
The wheat is still ripening
This July
While everlasting sweet peas still
spill down the railway embankment
The sun still warms
through breaks in the cloud
While my father waits
On a cold shelf
To be transformed
Taking some of this world with him
Power assisted doors enclose
And envelope musty sweet artichoke aromas.
Damp jurassic greens climb titanic stems
like trees, under glass
A slow prehistoric blanket
of mountaineering moss floods fibre haired stems
Ringed and ridged
To protect from giant tortoise teeth