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.
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By David Selzer