17th April 2022
Sometimes, about to step outside, I’m foreboded.
A green-fingered imagination floods my mind’s eye
With a surging Severn-strong tide of garden things needing doing:
All the tasks of time!
The season-to-season chase of
Planning, earth turning, liming,
Planting, thinning, weeding, composting,
Mowing, picking, sorting, storing,
Scything, pruning, burning and
Hotbarrow spreading redcharcoal firebeds…
Without which every effort, this life-blessed unchemical haven
Will not walk through the year with me as I would wish.
Perhaps you shout now
At these stubborn ink-silent words,
‘Stand back: let all grow as it will!’
But in those corners where I sometimes let it be
For lack of hours,
All else soon succumbs to the barbed diktat of brambles
Or is famined by fascist nettles.
So always I must fight for the rights of the trees,
Our silent friends
Who start their year beautiful with blossom,
Next give summer shade.
Then later furnish fruit, and drink
Either cleanly sweet or merryrousing;
And, when dormant, bestow us wood
So sweetly scented in all its hot and ash-sparse burning.
Thus must I shake off such wont of lassitude,
And embrace that everlasting list –
Glad to work, some days, for no more or less reward
Than the echo of one far thrush
Branch-riding a cheekpinch easterly.
© Christopher Jessop 2022
