Category / The Clearing / Poetry

There came the point when the secateur blades were within an inch of the antlers, which in the poor light seemed as grey as the honeysuckle. Then the roebuck had had enough. In one convulsive movement it flung itself into the air and broke free. It hurtled away, crashing downhill, disappearing into the darkness of the trees.

I remove an individual dandelion seed and let it drop onto my notebook. I keep plucking, and ten minutes later I have a pile of 82 seeds (or 83, but I’m not counting again) wavering across the pad in a soft froth.

She loves the stories hidden in the landscape – particular hedges, the small paths that signify cross-breeding links, farming styles, a new kerbside or a route home. To me Dorothy Hartley is a fellow student following the complex web of how the physical, natural world translates to our daily and cultural material experience.

I slip my hand deep inside the ewe. Reach in turn for one front hoof then bent leg. My fingers meet the inner wall of the ewe’s womb, her muscles ribbed in symmetry with the ridges of the ram’s horns.

As the water poured over the sills we could see it in several different forms: hanging just above the top sill, oily blue, darkly mirroring the sky; falling in a smooth sheet down the face of the weir, sparkling with light; breaking into cataracts that fell like braids; tumbling chaotically over the next sill; and so on down.

I’m writing to you about a tree. A pine tree, perhaps a hundred years old, maybe a little older, that until yesterday stood on a hill at the edge Bridport in Dorset. It’s a tree that you felled yesterday to make way for a new mobile phone mast. I’ll tell you the story as it happened, and at the end I’ll ask you to tell me a story in return.