Each day the earth offers itself
to the sun’s heat, water.
A picture I carry, a country
all weeds, pale flowers
shaped in poor soil.
The rain drifts over it, I hear
my feet crush the winter grass,
see my father who walks in a landscape
that seems not growing but shrinkage.
Returning, he did not pause on the hill
between the still faces of horses.
We were a darker blur on the stubble,
a fragment in time gone, we left
not a mark, not a footprint;
the cold forest, the birds of the moor
The hills lie on anvils of stone,
sheepcut, shaped by all weathers.
Great stones squat on the ridges
as if the ice might come back for them.
A few harebells lift to the wind.
There is a ragged field, patches of bramble.