The folks who live on the hill
Greenfinch flock between you and the sun
turning east west east again, light through a bee’s wing.
Folds of lily-fat smother the pond and the garlic’s big as apples.
The greenhouse sweats tomato beads.
Picnic blanket fields, frayed at the cliff edges,
throw up a dust of gulls. The sea is made from herring scales
and the afternoon’s a sound of flies.
Later, smeared with the stage blood of bramble,
we boil their sugary burstings, take a satisfying knife to the pear
while the shadows from the orchard stand like dolmens in the kitchen.
Wind reminds the hawthorn of its inclination, crucifies crows
and snatches the desperate message of smoke from chimney stacks.
You watch the flush poetry of fire pluck shamrocks of wet paw
from granite, swat the lazy insects of ash.
Like a claw, you have grappled this spot, this end.
There is nowhere to go between the Atlantic –
barbarian, berserk, a ragged legion endlessly falling on itself –
and Cold Fell. Guardhouse, watchtower fell
with its Pillar, Gable, Pike.
Ben Verinder lives in rural Hertfordshire and is the director of a reputation research agency. He studies creative writing at London’s City Lit and his poetry focuses on mythologies and loss. His biography of the writer and adventurer Mary Burkett was published in 2008.