By now I reckon I’m way past the pastoral,
Beyond beguilement
Immunised against contagious charms
The shallowed streams of dappled glamour
Contrived to pogrom trout;
The hedgerows’ anarchism, fecund mutuality
Shouldered like everything into the margins,
Edged out, then forced to fortress the
Multiple stab wounds of tilled fields;
The monotony of monocultures servicing monopolists
And comehithering the townies like a burnt out ladyboy.
And all of it as glitteringly contrived as an
18th Century automaton in subfusc,
Its china hands still jerking round
The same old endless card trick,
Watched with a soft-palating of gurgles
From the porch of Cotswolds cottages
The hue of earwax.
Though, for the briefest interlude,
As Earth tried once again to
Shrug us off like a
Lingering bad cold
The native chaos looked like fighting back
Before retreating once again to bide its time
And actually
The absence of that eternal trunkroad hum
Beneath uncrosshatched skies,
The patchwork silences below the birdsong,
Merely evoked an earlier nostalgic age
When cycle-clipped folklorists
Wrapped in tweed and tight ideals
Pedalled down the crunchy lanes
To lone, hagridden hamlets
To ameliorate Industrialised Warfare
By confiscating culture.