They’re making the hay early this year because it’s already been so hot. I hate it, a deep, lush habitat destroyed in the space of a few hours. It must seem like the end of the world to the animals that thought they were living in an impenetrable jungle, safe from predators.
Buzzards and egrets arrive in their dozens, following the tractor, sweeping up the bodies.
They came to mow the hay today, a time of tightened jaw and sharp-panged heart, of swooping, swirling buzzards, brown and blustery as sheets in the wind, and egrets following swan-winged in the tractor’s wake. They came to scythe, and fell a hundred lives, a thousand perhaps in the meadow sun, and beak and claw picked over the suddenly dead, corpse-filled stalks. In the night the fox will come and sniff with tender nose, through soft moonlight and gentle feather-call of owls, for the cooled blood, the dulling fur. .
And a young fox steps into the golden light, the haze of insects and dust motes, gilded by the setting sun. And does it wonder where the grass had gone, the ocean fauché and fallen, the jungle-place? Green shorn, the world in the tractor’s wake has changed, changed utterly, its beauty, stillborn.
Oh Jane, this is so wonderful and full of ache. Loved it! xx
A fabulous poem, Jane. When we lived on the farm, we used to get the harvest mice take refuge in the loft after the combines had been through. Made me think of Burn’s ‘To a Mouse’ if you know it.