At landscape's edge, falling away
to a conjuring of pebbled tides,
a wheat-field scrawls its stalks
of fieldnotes - ruled, legible,
a narrative of summering whose
end is already known. Here is
the tended, securely tenanted:
a cultivated cursive script that
speaks of surety, a last line
of defence against the littoral.
The sun bleeds yellow on yellow,
but the wheat knows it may rely
on a watering hand. Borders
doodled with poppies, teasels,
ragwort, nettles, cow parsley,
lavatera tell stories of their own,
illiterate and salty - songs of
the corrugated earth yielding
to roots in a reluctance of dust,
songs of bee-wing and birdwing.
This is marginalia: geological,
botanical, the limits of a field,
of a land, before soil shape-shifts
to chalk, to sand, before the losing
of footing, the treading of water.
We work so hard in the growing
of us, sings nettle, sings teasel.
So hard, the going, sings ragwort,
sings poppy. And still, crop writes
its chronicles, impervious and safe.
(Previously published in Finished Creatures magazine, issue 2)
