Haysel is the Suffolk dialect word for the hay harvest
Haysel
The rough upfingered stubble scrapes my feet,
I count the black-wrapped harvest of midsummer,
The sun-reflecting, tight-wound dumpling bales,
Handburning, secret, gifts in a hot wind
Scattered across the field. The chill New Year
With winter knife will open up their press
In yellow buttercups petalled on snowfall
To be twice-chewed by slow rotating jaws.
And all flesh is as grass.
I will sing it, I will set it with trumpets.
I will wander in the pastures of the high mountains,
And praise it in the colour of the saffron,
And the grass spike, the green speak through snowmelt.
I will consider it in the reverberation of the cymbal
And the reflorescence of the severed stem.
For the grass is cut flat to its web of root,
And its new stems will lick the sky again
And old frayed stems lift up again beside them.
All flesh is as grass.
So it will resist, withstanding winter.
The studded black-wrapped armour of the field
At the north edges of the circling world
Draws this straight strength from one growth to another.
And all flesh is as grass.
We may yet hold. Our seed blows in the wind.
All flesh is as grass.
********
In this place
Here they came and bulldozed the names together,
The stetch and the neathouse, and the home pightle
Into the long lonely plough,
Wet earth upgazing
Bare as the long sky.
The hedge has been uprooted
And there is nothing left of the old but the holly tree,
Thick shaking in a west wind, leaves glossed to black with dusk
Droplet wet, dripping.
No use for the old, unless it lives.
Disregarded,
Unpinned, uncatalogued.
The house has plastic windows. The wood rotted,
Its beams are cased in cement.
The wind blows out of the West, it is constant and bitter,
The hedges were all uprooted: they had no purpose.
Take away no earth.
Now the turbine spins, spins, spins,
And the fire need not crackle in the grate.
It had no purpose, so the chimney is empty.
I breathe in ice of the rain, and truth breathes with it.
No flesh on bones like these, they are love bare,
So here they came and bulldozed the names together,
Into the long lonely plough,
Bare as the long sky.
Home between places,
Unlovely my love,
Faithful the unhedged verge.
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