The Passage of Time.

It is three years this  month since my dear farmer died - the time has gone so quickly and yet in another sense he seems to have been gone for so long.

In the days (1993) when I was a widow living in a nearby village and he was a bachelor farming just a footpath away, I used to walk with Algy, my black pug, over the footpath each day.   If we met in his fields we would stand and chat for a while and it he happened to be getting his cows in to milk in the summer I would help him move the electric fence and walk down to the farm with him behind his herd.   They were happy days after the sadness of losing my first husband.   If I didn't see the farmer I would pick a few wild flowers, tie them together with a  blade of grass and hang them on the electric fence so that he knew I had been past.   This afternoon, tidying a bookshelf, I came across this poem I had written at the time.  I  thought I would post it for you to read in memory of him.

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).
(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 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,
soak it into their bones,
become that stillness,
protected, cocooned
within the confines
of their walls.

 
I walked across your field today.
I could leave you a message on your phone.
Or I could leave
two buttercups, a herb robert,
and a cuckoo flower, tied
with a strand of grass and
hanging on the fence.
Either way you will know. 

Rest in peace my dear farmer.
 
 
feel that stillness,