Plum Harvest

          Plum Harvest

“Where do you live?” I asked him.

“On the M25,” He said.

“I’ve been there since the summer 2012.

I was going to Berkhamstead.”

“It was a quarter to eight in the morning

when the traffic all ground to a halt.

It will be a few years till they get it clear,

they say.  It was nobody’s fault.”

“I’ve made some good friends in the car next door

who were trying to get to Tring.

I’ve got a bit of a garden around my car.

I sell vegetables in the spring.”

“We British are great in a crisis.

The woman next door bakes cakes

in an oven they’ve made on their engine,

and wonderful barbequed steaks.”

“I must be getting back soon.

There’s activity in the fast lane.

I hope I’ve got time to harvest the plums

before we start moving again!”

Trevor the turkey

Trevor the turkey

Trevor the turkey was putting on weight.

He thought it had something to do with the date.

He racked his brains, but he couldn’t remember

why his mum had said most turkeys don’t like December.

He didn’t know why he was feeling so nervy,

more and more as his shape got increasingly curvy.

He caught a bus from the farm, and went down to the gym,

got a personal trainer and tried to get slim.

He spent hours each day on the exercise bike,

but the farmer said, “Trevor, leave my farm if you like.

I’ve got no room here for a turkey so thin.”

So Trevor went off and booked himself in

to a health farm and lived for a month on a diet

of lettuce and fruit juices, peace and quiet.

He stayed until spring, then went back to the farm,

but the farmer said, “Trevor, whilst your figure has charm,

I know that, when cooked you’d be rather sinewy.

Your fat–free physique would be tasteless and chewy.”

So Trevor, with hardly a backward glance,

left England for ever and headed for France,

where he lives to this day in a flat near Mon Martre,

drinking wine, eating brie, reading Jean Paul Sartre.

The moral is, if you’re a turkey, remember,

always go on a diet at the end of November.

Patterns

Patterns

Do you remember

dripping on toast,

melting, mingling, marbling of meat jelly,

or an oily kipper with buttered bread?

(Mind the bones!)

Scraping with your nails

the frost fronds on insides of windows,

light patterns on the ceiling

from the smelly oil stove at night?

(Don’t get out of bed!)

Hopping across

flower patterns on cold lino,

to reach the rag rug,

making it a game,

pretending the floor was

shark-infested seas,

buttoning rubber liberty bodice buttons

with freezing fingers?

Lining up carrots,

(eat the carrots first),

trying to eat

huge plates of gummy mutton stew

that took an age to chew.

(You have to eat it all.)

Skipping on the pavement,

(don’t tread on the cracks),

tram lines on the road

(Mind! Don’t get your feet caught,)

tall stark skeletons of elms in winter

rooks’ nests clumped together, high up, high up,

(if you see one rook, it’s a crow.

If you see a group of crows, they’re rooks.)

Streets of scrubbed front doorsteps

gleaming white before breakfast,

lines of flapping washing,

(It’s all a competition.)

mothers with hair in sleek victory rolls,

flowery overalls crossed on their chests.

Eerie air raid sirens,

(they have to test them,)

a quarter of a Mars bar each on Sundays,

(special treat,)

mangles and mincers,

galvanised buckets of washing

boiling on the stove.

Do you remember the pattern of the days?

The Nuthatch Nest

The Nuthatch’s Nest

Meet me near the nuthatch’ nest,

for who shall know but you and I

just where this creeping creature built

her home away from prying eye?

Who else has listened to her call.

Who else has spotted, as they stood

absorbing the sweet solitude,

in that quiet clearing in the wood,

that flitting flash of peach and grey,

that darting streak, that fluting cry,

whose hearts rejoiced to spy her

momentary rest, but you and I?

Who else had tied, on trunks and branches,

squirrel-proofed tubes of wood and wire,

who mended, tended, debated, worried,

discussed and fussed, and moved them higher?

who else had trudged, with earnest wish,

with nuts in rucksacks, every week?

Who scrambled and scrabbled to keep them filled,

to tempt the searching nuthatch beak?

Who spotted, one day, as the leaves

 blown by a breeze out off the way,

a hole in a trunk, and, as we watched,

an eye-stripe and a flash of grey.

Who watched to see, laboriously crafted,

from what was a jagged hole before,

with beakfuls of mud, on many trips

a perfectly circular front door?

Who but we wait, like anxious fathers,

helplessly hoping that all will be well

for those nuthatch eggs we hope have been laid,

for the first beak to break through the delicate shell.

A question for those who dare to assume

that we are in any way obsessed

with this elusive blue-grey bird-

Have you ever seen a nuthatch’ nest?

The Keeper of the Egg

The Keeper of the Egg

I am the keeper,

The keeper of the Egg.

Here in my hand

is the egg of the future,

for this is the world egg.

It is from the Earth.

Our world has given birth.

I am here to guard it.

I will keep it while it sleeps.

Soon, it will wake.

Soon, tiny rivers will begin to flow

from all the cracks and crevices

on its surface.

Rivers will form seas.

Mountains will rise.

Minute forests will grow.

Fish will swim in the waters.

Animals will appear on the land.

Birds will sing in the trees.

Its surface will teem with life.

At the end of the year,

on the stroke of midnight,

on New Year’s Eve,

I will carry it

to the top of a hill.

I will hold it aloft

and it will rise.

Up into the air

and out… out into space.

As it rises it will grow.

It will become a new world.

For this is

the Millennium Egg.