A Poems about Farms and Wildlife

 

They don’t have to be mutually exclusive…. an orchard with flowers underfoot.

 

But sometimes farmers feel that they have to plough every patch their tractors fit into, for fear those flowers take energy away from the apples and nuts.

 

Thoughts on seeing a recently-cleaned water pond on Saint Patrick’s Day

 

On a Sunday, the seventeenth, I went for a walk in the countryside about the village.

I walked along the hedges, trimmed now in March before the birds came come along and put a fly in a farmer’s plans.

I paused over an old walled water pond, for the vegetable plot, to perhaps look upon a frog, or salamander.

It was scrubbed clean. The concrete pale below the clear water reflecting the crystal blue.

Not a boatman stroked across the surface, ne’er a leaf lay upon the bottom to hide a frog or newt.

For what would a farmer do with silt? A streamlined machine these fields, these springs,

And cleanliness is next to godliness, of course. The wild world was sterilised of sprits in favour of clean sheets.

The dragons were already gone before Saint Patrick stepped upon a snake.

A day will come when none of us will see one, no matter where we seek.

 

Of course, the day seems to be coming faster than we feared, with the new  UN report about to come out today, Monday, declaring that a million species are about to go extinct if we don’t turn this shit, sorry ship, around toot sweet, as they say.

Which is terribly hard to tell your kids when they ask at the age of eight.

I didn’t take a photo of the empty pond, but I did help this lad across the road a few days later after some long-awaited rain.

 

 

Poem: the Advantages of Anthropomorphism

Was reminded of this the other day when listening to an onpointradio show about cats and dogs getting personhood…

It’s a topic I’ve thought about a bit in relation to my book on the sociology and future (or lack thereof) of hunting, which I hope to get back to later in the year…

Not quite the scientific method, though..

 

The Advantages of Anthropomorphism

 

Sometimes, if we would examine events

Could think of these things, from another’s

Point of view, and see all sides of situations,

Such things, which are now hard to understand,

Should be much more explicable…

 

Anthropomorphism is frowned upon, but why

Is the worm crawling across the asphalt?

 

In the same way that the squirrels have not forgotten

The location of their acorns, for they can afford

To ignore the extras as the winter thaws

And spring buds burst with sap, more appealing,

 

We could imagine we were the moths, wandering

Between raindrops with no moon, full or not,

To guide them past streetlights in the damp night

To what we know not – well, we all know what.

 

Will the earthworm drown upon the grass?

Is it trying to escape the rain? No. There is no

Escaping, nor a need, but instead it is taking

Advantage of the damp to strike out from its

Little patch of grass, in search of pastures new,

Be that soil or sex, past our artificial boundaries.