Garden Museum 08.04.24
Beyond the torn tarpaulin hut
a willow throws a canopy of bees
Where earthen shelves dug round the tree
are lit by beams in the rhythms of the breeze
- or by faeries, a girl once said
Enamelled tins and texts tell tales,
of lives lapsed into scything dust
And a tortoise shell cups an ear
to forgotten Greek seas, echoed
in aqueous fragments of pearly conch
In the next garden,
the woman sings
to the radio, hanging wind-snap billows -
peg spragged, rippled and tousled
like her tied-up hair
Shoes thrown in plough shares
no longer answer a clucking “hup”
as tractors putter and horses fade
they’re hung on sheds, they’re hung on doors
they’re hung on superstitious rumours
Oak apples surround a miner’s lamp,
as though wasps need a glimmer of safety
in the deep down, dropped down air-rush cages
squeaking down to black death-traps,
gored out for rubbing hands and spitting pans
on hissing, singing ranges
VI shrapnel, jagged,
is wired with humbugs - to explode
And a steel tortoise, dug-in for decades
is a velvet of rust
Swastikas dance
where ears that listened for Tommy
never heard the shell
that buried them in mud
Black-rubbed fruit-wood tools,
faces in the grain of elm-seat stools
and hedgerow treasures I have kept
were fetched on a bike whose foundling wheels
once blocked holes in a garden fence
Beyond the mowing chatter of lawns
and doll’s devoted teas
beaky skulls and knotty deadfall
await, bright minds to meet
The cuckoo clock calls through the “dinner’s ready” window.
Sparrows chatter in the dust.
A Vulcan jet rips the sky.
and quietly I muse on a clay pipe sherd:
“We’re open” sings the blackbird…