Cold Spell

A pretend farm lies within these borders,
hedges, fields and muddy tracks.
One un-harvested by contract machinery,
unbounded by electrified fencing.

As I stand on a grass verge
a mile of tarmac bubbling behind me,
the horizon buckling in the heat haze,
I begin to build.
Wood for concrete, timber joists for steel.
In my head a new farm appears.
The old farm rising in the skeleton of the new.
Concrete cladding and corrugated tin roofing
splits and flies off over the hills.
The Thames Water sign on the barn end
floats like a stamp soaked off an envelope.

I am rebuilding my past in the present
when the daydream is shattered.
A tractor lurches towards me
cab dazzling like a sharp scythe
lifted from a grinder.

The driver asks me what I’m doing.
I mutter that I used to live here
— What, he says, in that ol’ wreck.
He doesn’t believe me
but the wary mouth under the goggles
and dirty John Deere baseball cap
lets go a few more words

-Don’t ye go in there, dangerous see.
I say yes, having already been in.

Standing on roots, brambles and branches
I got to peer through a broken window
at bare floorboards and a grate
littered with flakes of asbestos,
ash and plaster.
By that grate my sister entered this world
on a cold February evening during the cold snap of 1962.

A Jamaican nurse hovers over my mother
as firelight dances on the ceiling.
Black hands cradle the white bundle
as it is passed over the sheets to my mother.
I am three years old, drawing in the condensation
and watching feathers of snow melt against the window.

When I am asked what I shall hand on
I shall say this.

My dowry of words.
Fire, water, glass, ice, darkness.

Available in free Pamphlet ‘Last Farmer’
Available here: https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=452