Grania Read
Elegy for Rocks Green Farm
There is a curlew
in the car park at Sainsbury’s,
her beak an impossible length
of maxilla and mandible
balanced in a force-draw curve,
a waning crescent
designed for probing
marsh mud and loose loam
for shrimp and earthworm.
The delicate ogive
jabs and scrapes at tarmac
where, last year,
she laid a star of eggs
in a hollow of timothy
and sweet vernal,
cock’s foot and Yorkshire fog,
screened by tall cuckoo
flower, pink for distraction,
and purple betony, for defence against sorcery.
She shouldn’t be here
with her spindle legs
and
fine elbow joints,
her long skitter toes
catching on sticky asphalt
and square-cornered white lines.
It was the betony that failed.
For what sorcery is here:
black, orange, reflective steel,
a regiment of lights
to dazzle night through witching hour
and all the way to morning,
to vanquish the pipistrelle
which used to hang in the farmhouse attic
with pointed ears and shining eyes.
First came the fences:
silver, closely meshed and high.
For months they hung, tied together,
leaning wonkily, looking amateurish,
as if nothing serious could come from them.
Like Zeus lulled by Hypnos,
the Nimbys drifted in torpor,
driving the schoolrun past the fences
which enclosed the place
where they take their children
every year on St Lawrence’s Day,
when the Gypsies come
and put up a circus tent—
the curlew chicks
fledged and gone—
for clowns and acrobatic terriers,
and forge a path of
flattened grass through
fescue shivering with cabbage whites,
paper winged and green veined.
The fences were the Trojan horse
that released the diggers.
Too late the Nimbys rose
and were decisively defeated
by one government official
who signed a paper
without visiting.
I was not brave. I could not watch
as Trojans watched dead Hector d
Powerless as Andromache, I turned my face
as diggers sank their teeth in unspoiled soil.
Rocks Green Farm was drawn and quartered;
greedy buckets spilled its guts
in slag heaps of wilting meadow grass.
There is a yellow notice
in the car park at Sainsbury’s:
‘Maximum stay 2 hours,’
which will make it hard for the Gypsies
who won’t have time
to put up the tent
and take the ticket money
and sit everyone down,
Mums and Dads and Aunty,
and Gus and baby Charlie,
on rows of benches that won’t wobble
like they used to
because the ridge and furrow
made by the Medieval ploughmen
grandfathers of the Rocks Green farmer,
now dead, is neatly
flattened.
There is an orange notice
in the carpark at Sainsbury’s:
‘Bee Hotel’ and a QR code.
The bees can’t read or scan a code
so maybe that’s why they don’t realise
they’re supposed to go inside.
They’ve left the Rocks Green orchard,
where monk’s hood grew on apple trees
at a rate of one centimetre per decade,
and found another, six miles away,
which is safe for now
until the day the fences arrive
and then the diggers
to put in concrete pilings
for solar panels
which will Save The World
so bees can live in peace;
which will make electricity
so carparks can eliminate
the dark.
There are no noticeboards
for curlews
in the car park at Sainsbury’s.
Raye Hendrix, currently a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon, is the author of the chapbooks Every Journal is a Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press) and Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press).