message on a wire

 Before the farmer and I married in 1993 I would often walk across the fields from my cottage towards the farm, hoping to meet him as he walked up to the pasture to gather the cows in for the evening milk.  Sometimes I would walk back with him and stand and chat as he milked his girls and then walk back to the field with him.

When he collected them he would move the electric fence giving them new grass after the evening milking.  If I missed him I would gather up a few flowers from the grass or the hedge-bottom, tie them into a bunch with a strand of grass and hang them on the electric wire, knowing he would find them.

Here is a poem I wrote about it:

  Message on a wire.

There is a stillness in your field:

Not a silence

(for the mistle-thrush sings

on the topmost bough

of the hawthorne tree,

and the beck finds its voice

as it slips over the stones

in the South meadow.)

But a stillness

from long ago

when the grass was first sown

and peppered with wild flowers

in their season. 

One day in July

the stillness would be broken,

the grass would be mown,

tossed, dried in the sun, smelt

and carted away to the stack.

Then the stillness would return.

Men who care for fields

feel that stillness,

(It soaks into their bones)

become that stillness,

protected, cocooned

within the confines of the walls.

I walked across your field today.

I could leave you a message

on your answer-phone.

Or I could leave

two buttercups, a herb-robert

and a cuckoo flower, tied

with a strand of grass,

hanging on the fence.

Either way

and you will know

I love you.