The Concise British Flora in Colour
The Reverend W Keble Martin, 1965
Netting the soul
of meadow, woodland, towan,
with one thousand,
four hundred and eighty-six portraits,
you travelled the veins of these islands;
gathered the common, rare, valued, unloved.
Smocked each page
with the colours of plain truth.
I cannot think otherwise than this:
that your sermons strode the pews
like wiry stems of oat grass,
sowing its whiskered ears
over your congregation;
that you captured a marriage
with linked fingers of convulvulus,
one-day shimmer of pink and white
in fierce, unrepentant entanglement;
marked death in the parish
with meadow saffron’s brief shine
of sun-gold stamens.
And lifted, as treasure
your communion cup,
the five-petalled white chalice
of a dog rose.
Jenny Hill‘s first collection was Voices of the First World War (available on Amazon). Jenny has had poems published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Orbis, Strix, and was winner of the Poetry Society Members’ competition in 2017.