The view from our window is still the same, Gregson's farm: 

   the son has it now

Landscape littered with things discarded, wooden ladder up to an 

   empty hayloft, eyes ascend to seagulls

perched, pigeons squatting on a blue slate roof, gable end, and,

   down below, vacant pigsties, bricks fallen in

grass, where old apple trees lean into each other, twisted grey

   branches, the colour of washing-line rope.

Silvery-sage remnants of an orchard and apples blighted, small, 

   hard, green, insect-bitten, wormed and tart

bunched among dry, papery leaves.  An iron plough, rusting by the 

   side of the shed, has a flat hollow-shaped seat.

Gouged with holes, it felt hard, cold on our skin through thin 

   summer frocks: now it lies deep in wild grass,

ferns and stinging nettles, iron teeth of the harrow poking out.

   The scythe's curved blade has slid

against a tipped-over bucket of chickenfeed, moldy, smelling of 

   damp earth like the outhouses

with their rotted wooden seats.







Published in The Literary Review
           
       
          
        
          
         
          
        
         
        
            
           
            
           
          
        
         
       
    



    .  Vol. 44.  No. 3.  Spring 2001.