September 29th 2023
So much rain, these weeks, from racing clouds!
Thus when this night wakes me
To show that full gold disc sky sailing,
Quickly dressed and down the stairs.
My path, now Autumn has over-rolled Summer,
No longer beside barley stubble:
With such steel strength
The field has been overturned.
Sadly,
Before the fuel-guzzling plough,
Such the wisdom of modern farmers,
Every hedge hereabouts was tractor-ripped of growth and fruit
Which could have homed and sustained our local wildlife,
Sheltered and fed migrating birds too…
And this, reflect,
Was the second of those twice-yearly hydraulic holocausts
By which our so-called Guardians Of The Land
Celebrate utter hatred of Nature:
Their first, in Spring, you understand,
Is for the destruction of nest sites.
Past shallow rockscoop pools,
With sandy bottoms crazy patterned by sea snails
As if so many little hands had been finger painting,
Onto that perfect plain of sand…
At the far end of which, rarest of surprises for both of us,
I catch out a fox snouting the surf line:
They, with silent sea-bounds,
Fast dissolve into barnacled shadows.
Strip fast, and in:
Ever the night way.
Safe of thought, I don’t go far out
Into the onshore breeze’s smallish and randomy but earloud surf.
No glim of phosphorescence in these moonjewelled waves –
Not that I expected.
After a sparse star-count,
Back to the beach like a child,
With forward flops into each overtaking breaker
Until I’m sand-stretched and foam-surrounded.
Three circling runs of the beach to dry,
Then homewards with a mind now tea-focused
Wishing I had remembered an apple:
Should have been obvious,
In a house so fruit flavoured this time of year.
Striding, I muse about it being less than a month
‘Til I turn sixty-six:
I’ve just moonswum, something I’d never done
By my sixth, or sixteenth, or twenty-sixth birthday…
So ageing has benefits; but how I wish that,
Nowadays,
Time’s escapement had that grandfather tick of the childhood hall,
Not this frantic whizz of a clockwork toy!
© Christopher Jessop 2023
