"kendal" poems - Hello Poetry

Its perspective skewed, the lie of this land is all tilts and angles. Black-thorned hedges rise in white clouds to the hilltop farm. On this Damson Day it is a damp-mist morning, the horizon a grey smudge. Up forest trail and fell-ward, on the left, a winter-laid hedge, to the right, a mossy wall. A riot of new growth lies at the feet, by the hand: wild garlic, wilder strawberry, fresh ferns, and the tiniest violets hiding on this old path. Steep steps climb to a four-acre orchard primrosed under the pint-sized trunks of its wiry trees. There’s the blossom, white as snow. *Hard to imagine five months hence, fully plummed and picked, Bullace and Damascene driven by the cartload to Kendal market. 250 tons they’d reckoned once, taken by train to the Preston canners. Nearer home the fruit was gined and beered, cheesed and chucknied.* Then into the forest, a plantation girdled by a dry stone wall tall on the moorland edge where beyond the grey limestone shards have broken through what little grass is left for absent cattle. Wild with wind up here today, so down to reclaim the forest’s shelter, and down through fields to a farm en fête all cars and crowds. This, a damson day of best-judged jam, with artisan breads, Morris with swords, fiddling folk, agility dogs, St Kilda sheep, blue eggs and tents of crafts galore. In the mist and drizzle homeward and facing west, there across the valley lie outposts of blossoming, fields embroidered, and the farms necklaced.

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Apr 14, 2014

Apr 14, 2014 at 4:18 PM UTC

nigel-morgan

On Damson Day

Its perspective skewed, the lie of this land is all tilts and angles. Black-thorned hedges rise in white clouds to the hilltop farm. On this Damson Day it is a damp-mist morning, the horizon a grey smudge. Up forest trail and fell-ward, on the left, a winter-laid hedge, to the right, a mossy wall. A riot of new growth lies at the feet, by the hand: wild garlic, wilder strawberry, fresh ferns, and the tiniest violets hiding on this old path. Steep steps climb to a four-acre orchard primrosed under the pint-sized trunks of its wiry trees. There’s the blossom, white as snow. *Hard to imagine five months hence, fully plummed and picked, Bullace and Damascene driven by the cartload to Kendal market. 250 tons they’d reckoned once, taken by train to the Preston canners. Nearer home the fruit was gined and beered, cheesed and chucknied.* Then into the forest, a plantation girdled by a dry stone wall tall on the moorland edge where beyond the grey limestone shards have broken through what little grass is left for absent cattle. Wild with wind up here today, so down to reclaim the forest’s shelter, and down through fields to a farm en fête all cars and crowds. This, a damson day of best-judged jam, with artisan breads, Morris with swords, fiddling folk, agility dogs, St Kilda sheep, blue eggs and tents of crafts galore. In the mist and drizzle homeward and facing west, there across the valley lie outposts of blossoming, fields embroidered, and the farms necklaced.