hillwalker
07-26-2010, 06:05 PM
BADGERWATCH
Flitting from the loose-box
pirouetting pipistrelles
darting in and out the hay loft;
such a sultry, humming heat
with dusk an hour away.
Cross the yard
to drag that rusted five-bar gate
that skims its wiper-blade of rotten rail
across the sludge,
leaving a clue that something passed along the midden’s edge.
The fields look wary in this light;
Ten Acre wheat,
Big Bradley almost ready to be grazed again,
the Croft still wet but lush enough to silage,
and the Black Pit left to dock and thistle,
creeping down in silence to the ‘Quay.
Merseyside a ribbon wrought in sodium and sulphur
stretched across the dark horizon;
a touch of Dante where the smoking pits of Stanlow
fill the August night with steam and smoke,
an orange flicker where a belly-dance of gas flame
never dies.
The tilted moon sits moored above the steelworks,
low enough to scrape its keel
against their towering chimneys,
clank its anchor chains
along the submerged pipes.
Sometimes at night I’d lie awake
and hear the sudden whump of heat, too distant to be felt,
the blast of hot air from the furnaces
a thrombent glow as skyline blushed as loud as any lover’s cry,
the gasp of ecstasy across the Dee.
The woods lie in this hollow on our left
beyond that fallen stump,
that gash of silver in the velvet;
this is where we found the fox lynched in the branches,
carcass smiling still beneath the rot,
the hurled out scrape of sand and roots and claw prints
marking out the sett.
My tree is already picked out,
my baler twine and roll of sacking.
A pair of sticks, not green and supple but brittle dry,
one up each trouser leg.
“’E grabs you, ‘e won’t let yer go until ‘e ‘ears yer leg bone snap.”
Two hours of fidgeting
and then the sound before the shadow.
A cautious snuffle
as it scoffs the cubes of ‘Dairylea’,
my bait.
A snort of relish, almost a guffaw,
and then it scuffles through the undergrowth;
a moment’s glimpse but worth the wait.
- - - - -
Now forty years too late
the fields are long forgotten;
a swamp of cul-de-sacs and building-sites and precincts,
given names that have no weight of age,
an ‘Acorn Drive’ where sycamores once swayed
and jettisoned their seed,
‘The Orchards’ where we last grew kale and turnip.
And from the back of ‘Wirral View’
the wilderness of reclaimed land,
the steelworks now emasculated at the water’s edge;
the pickling line, the smelting pits,
the Marsh Mills and the cooling towers,
the Z-Galv,
all demolished;
not a hint of all the toil,
the bruising dust and grime
that burnished everything with glitter.
But in the woods
somewhere at night the badgers still come out
to twitch and scrawp between the brambles…..
H
Flitting from the loose-box
pirouetting pipistrelles
darting in and out the hay loft;
such a sultry, humming heat
with dusk an hour away.
Cross the yard
to drag that rusted five-bar gate
that skims its wiper-blade of rotten rail
across the sludge,
leaving a clue that something passed along the midden’s edge.
The fields look wary in this light;
Ten Acre wheat,
Big Bradley almost ready to be grazed again,
the Croft still wet but lush enough to silage,
and the Black Pit left to dock and thistle,
creeping down in silence to the ‘Quay.
Merseyside a ribbon wrought in sodium and sulphur
stretched across the dark horizon;
a touch of Dante where the smoking pits of Stanlow
fill the August night with steam and smoke,
an orange flicker where a belly-dance of gas flame
never dies.
The tilted moon sits moored above the steelworks,
low enough to scrape its keel
against their towering chimneys,
clank its anchor chains
along the submerged pipes.
Sometimes at night I’d lie awake
and hear the sudden whump of heat, too distant to be felt,
the blast of hot air from the furnaces
a thrombent glow as skyline blushed as loud as any lover’s cry,
the gasp of ecstasy across the Dee.
The woods lie in this hollow on our left
beyond that fallen stump,
that gash of silver in the velvet;
this is where we found the fox lynched in the branches,
carcass smiling still beneath the rot,
the hurled out scrape of sand and roots and claw prints
marking out the sett.
My tree is already picked out,
my baler twine and roll of sacking.
A pair of sticks, not green and supple but brittle dry,
one up each trouser leg.
“’E grabs you, ‘e won’t let yer go until ‘e ‘ears yer leg bone snap.”
Two hours of fidgeting
and then the sound before the shadow.
A cautious snuffle
as it scoffs the cubes of ‘Dairylea’,
my bait.
A snort of relish, almost a guffaw,
and then it scuffles through the undergrowth;
a moment’s glimpse but worth the wait.
- - - - -
Now forty years too late
the fields are long forgotten;
a swamp of cul-de-sacs and building-sites and precincts,
given names that have no weight of age,
an ‘Acorn Drive’ where sycamores once swayed
and jettisoned their seed,
‘The Orchards’ where we last grew kale and turnip.
And from the back of ‘Wirral View’
the wilderness of reclaimed land,
the steelworks now emasculated at the water’s edge;
the pickling line, the smelting pits,
the Marsh Mills and the cooling towers,
the Z-Galv,
all demolished;
not a hint of all the toil,
the bruising dust and grime
that burnished everything with glitter.
But in the woods
somewhere at night the badgers still come out
to twitch and scrawp between the brambles…..
H