It’s the launch of Pushing out the Boat Magazine today, and I’m reading my poem, Farmer, from their current issue. I try not to be a writer writing about writing, but after I really had trundled behind a load of manure wondering what it was all about, this happened:
Farmer
Trundle a house-sized load of turnip-fragranced earth along the B6365.
Pile up shite in steaming heaps edged with frost.
Bring the cows in. Bring the cows out.
Leave fifteen sheep in a field full of cabbages.
Combine-harvest a field in the dead of night.
Bring the cows in. Bring the cows out.
Perhaps all work is, from outside, baffling.
Words put down in one order, shifted to another field,
the excess loaded onto a trailer,
carried with care along the B7476
as a line of cars trundles behind me, mystified.
Stella Hervey Birrell 