Where the primary school and the houses end
are hawthorn hedges and occasional oaks
on either side of the lane. From the school gates
the leafless trees are an arching, tangled
fretwork – closer each twig is proud, discrete,
vital, sentient. A sudden gust of wind,
or a lightning blow, in one oak tree’s
early growth snapped off a branch, and left an arm
with a claw like a beak. Shut behind the gates
the gradground children have no chance at all
to imagine the stub of a branch a bird,
note the old birds’ nests in the hedgerows,
acorns crushed beneath occasional tyres,
and, whole, nestling in the wintry verges –
or count the first green leaves.