Poem: What you might learn when laying a hedge
Beside the brash pile, the fire smouldering, a question:
What is a well-kept hedge? Clipped and boxed,
neat as a wall - or brimming, stretching,
thickening, with roots reaching deep?
Look anywhere on a farm and there it is:
the need to make a choice, to count the costs
and when tending a hedge, will it be flailed,
each year, or trimmed and laid, every ten?
Flailing: a matter of lone man and tractor,
harsh blades, diesel, and a single spring
for flowers to bloom, just one summer for trees
to give all they’ve got, only to be hacked again.
Laying: a matter of many hands, kinship,
billhooks, fireside tea, charcoal, and, over years,
growth: a three-dimensional meadow,
a tiny wood, food for birds, food for earth.
Flailed or laid, in pounds and pence,
there’s not much in it.
But not everything that counts
can be counted.
After the day’s graft, faces glow, billhooks rest,
stories flow. At the field edge, birds, curious,
flit about, inspect our work.
