All day long, as I climbed,
in sunshine, up to the holy well,
then on to the Napoleonic watchtower,
and halted behind it, on a headland
READ SOME MORE
tramped brown by sheep, to watch the sea
carve slow blue paths through cliffs and skerries,
May’s soundtrack played on and on-
bee-hum, the high meheh of hill-lambs,
the lifted songs of larks in warm grass
and later, near the court tomb in the valley,
the cuckoo’s shameless call.
When did I forget it,
mislay it or roll it up,
this tapestry of sound
which pleasures us
by spilling hawthorn hedges
in whin-scented summer,
as pools of yellow iris
are conjured out of wet fields
and late bluebells, vetch and fern
capture the ditches?
Moya Cannon’s most recent collection is Keats Lives (Carcanet)
