All day, the drone of a saw,
and resin across the pines
of dark Mortimer forest.
With each completed sever
it fell by a whining octave.
By dusk, in the clearing they’d made,
all that remained was their dust,
the dottle from someone’s pipe
and ranks of seasoning limbs
weeping congealing amber.
*
The heat, the fragrance of hay,
the incontrovirtible end
of summer, the country halt,
boarding a single-track train,
weeds prising the platform oblique
where they waved and waved and waved.
*
Dewed cowslips, roses, the grave
under a yew in the garden
of lichened Pipe Aston church,
a dusty Visitors’ Book….
We were once there: 17th
of June 1975.
Peter Reading
arspythia 