My Mother Considers Her Callows Farm
From a parlour window I see sunlight
creeping across the fields,
and how some nights streams spar
with moonbeams – but now
I’ve slopped the shallows
enough for sense, wearied of
the skylark rising with dawn or against
the falling dark. This land
never was certain of itself, nor kind
to shoe leather, no woolpack
and no feather bed. Neither
did it pretend the deed of adding a scrap
or screed of comfort to living.
This ground swayed, spun a reel
in my head, played me
as the darting minnows played
its rivulets, nor could it be decreed
as mud or flood, or even
in high summer as rippling meadow.
I shepherded my flock by pond
and lough, one false step
from water lilies – first flowers the earth
ever made to float. Curlew
would clock for dusk, or a snipe
play bleating sky goat above the mire.
I was held by these, repelled
by the rout of feathers
divulging a vixen’s kill, the glint
of a poacher’s snare. And I wondered,
often as not, at how the world
is caught; death implicit
in every feature and form of creature;
wondered, after, at the glories
we smather in the struggle to propel
our human lot. Yet would feel
the lump in my gullet soften
when a flock of wild geese honked,
a pheasant hiccupped, or the wind spun
wrinkles across the turlough.
What more could either of us ask
of the other, this rough pasture
and this tired grafter? ‘Custodianship’,
‘respect’ – such civil sounds
smear my mouth. Surely, I declare,
to the secret water dragon
that ripples in and under everything,
the wonder has to be
how we lasted the hardship together.
*
Learn more about Patrick on the Contributors’ page.
Patrick’s latest collection, Keepsake, was published by Dedalus Press in 2024 and is available here.
(Photo: caroline legg/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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