Always I think of the Mere sky blued like this,
Except at channel meetings:
There the breeze, funnelled by foot-steeped reeds,
Dances the surface stippleripple indigo.
Earth much moved here, recently:
With hydraulic slavering of glacial clay
Someone has been fenning banks more level,
Their sclooping steelshine bucket
Dredging up weedwreathed blue and grey and
Dumpsmoothing out of it buttergleam straightness.
Few waterbirds, today, ride open water at imagined anchor;
Are they secreting that sedge or, for now, flown elsewhere?
Whichever true, the gust-twisty air overhead
Is sharp edged to earfill
By gulls yarkly bickering –
Politician mimickers, I reckon,
Who despair the pointless disputations of every human parliament
While all around the natural world unravels ever faster.
© Christopher Jessop 2022
