Harvest
For once when you asked
I followed without question,
brushing through the sour nettles
that choke the gap in the hawthorn hedge
to stand at the edge of this moment
you have led us to:
full and clear
it rises like music over the wheat.
Far off a back-yard dog
starts barking at the stars
and is answered in kind –
We are this far apart but not alone.
Across the bone dry fields
a farmhouse window is shining like home
as a light will always shine
when seen from a great enough distance.
Hide Nor Hair
By lunchtime the fields and private woods should be echoing,
the doors of barns and outbuildings dragged open,
their rusted machinery exposed to the sun.
By dusk it should be serious as the river.
It takes until nightfall to become a dream –
the creak of dark stairs, the back door sticking
for the last time, that ring of mushrooms on the green
blooming in the moonlight like a soul.
*Esther Morgan's third Bloodaxe Books collection Grace, will be published next year. She recently won the Bridport Poetry Prize and was placed third in the Mslexia Poetry Competition. She is Historic Recordings Manager for The Poetry Archive and her own Poetry Archive recording can be heard here.