Woodcock Hay

Cuckoo oats and woodcock hay

makes a farmer run away

– old Cornish proverb

Sugars peak at midsummer then fall as the nights draw in

and for the third year in a row we’re entering August

with the hay barn empty but for some bought-in straw

and your motorbike wedged in a corner stall.

We lose patience and cut on a rumour. Rain threatens all day,

the Met Office map sprouting clouds and the odd blue drop

until out of the grey comes summer and the meadows buzz

with a mob of machines, all laying up futures in grass.

The Massey steams out of the shed like a red dragon,

the Bamford baler behind it a triumph of ’70s calibration,

part Wallace and Grommit, part Heath Robinson,

the pick up all of a pother, the chute dropping sweet oblongs

onto the stubble. This is grace consecrated in metal,

grab arms gathering, hydraulics shunting the hay

to the needles, knotters, cutters, in precise sequence,

their neat fit the only magic we know or need.