We were away

Editing this post to say, please do not listen to the audio. It's not mine, I didn't authorise it and it's awful, like all the robotic text to voice gadgetry.  It's an affront to any poetic effort. 


We were away

For a week we were away, trains and trains away in the city with traffic rumble, voices sharp and pointed, dogs yelping and the grey dust of the streets. We were away with the milky pink newborn, the wailing cries, squinted smiles, fingers that crooked a dance of their own.

We cooked in a different kitchen, listened for birds in garden trees full of traffic rumble and sharp voices, stealthy cats. 

We dipped into the northern world where a baby was growing, distant, amid traffic rumble, grey dust, but still pink and milky, smiling with a squint, and we wished there were not so many trains between us, because we missed our green silence full of bird noise.

We returned on trains and trains and the clicking of departure indicators, doors sliding and the rocking rumble and grumble of train decks. 

We returned still with our sea-legs, slipped into the lush green of meadows, fescue high enough to hide the racing hares, gemmed with orchids, clover, buttercups, and the ditches spilling over with pink of wild lilies, field poppy red, muscari all gone to indigo bottle-brush, baby’s breath, meadowsweet and nigella. 

And our ears filled up with the hoo-po-po and oriole woodwind, finches, tits, the shriek of swifts, shrill kestrel cry and everywhere the bubbling, warbling, counting in oo-oo-oo of nightingales. 

How we missed the nightingales and the fox bark at night, the deer bark in the day, the green, lush, nightingale-chuckling hedgerows of home.