Poetry Corner

Walking the Weald

We walk out early, glad of slow-growing light, the mild air from the south: both gifts unlooked for, now, in a cold month only just spilling clumps of daffodils across the grass -- nodding their honey on the breeze.

And bumblebees, clumsy along the path-edge, blundering into legs and sticks and boots, like drunkards waking in surprise to find it's morning, after all, no longer a winter night's dreaming.

Above the greensand ridge we're following, on the north edge of the Weald, two buzzards go up on thermals: spiral over spiral on invisible sky-stairs. In their gimlet eyes we are as nothing; their shrieked calls are in a language meant for each other, not for us.

Then fieldfares explode ahead of us -- a hundred, more -- fling diamond breasts into the haze; swirl, gleeful with sunlight, glutted on rotting orchard pears; gleam like silver coins against the blue...

Now, all along the Greensand Way, crab-apples, fat and red, decorate bare trees.

Lizzie Ballagher