For John Chapman

I can see for miles across the wolds, low hills

receding. The top of the rise is a field

of stubble that was rape. I imagine

last year’s sweet scented, false meadow of sharp

yellow and green. On the field’s far side

a flock of wild geese is grazing the stalks.

The cloudless, cerulean sky, empty

of con trails, seems closer, domed, as if curved

like our planet. In an ancient copse,

below the rise, a woodpecker drills.

The silence that follows, the stillness,

is of another, imagined time.

As I walk down the slope past the copse,

a wild deer, a hind, is drinking from a pond.

I stop, awed. We are, at best, irrelevant.

The margins of the arable field

may revert to nettles, the rest grass from which

a rising lark may sing.