Ann Pilling

It feels like a long time since Simon Armitage walked the Pennine Way and did a reading in my sitting room. Autumn is coming quickly now, quicker than I can ever remember and my son in Suffolk says it’s coming fast there too, so it’s not just Up North. I opened my bedroom curtain the other day and looked at ‘my field’ down which lovely trees sort of ‘march’, along a dry stone wall and I said aloud ‘The trees are in their autumn beauty’ the opening lines of Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’’ I love that poem, especially how they ‘paddle in the cold companionable streams..’ How can Yeats get away with ‘paddle’? But he does.

So many poems about Autumn, Keats springs first to mind but I love Binyon’s ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ and that poem which starts ‘Now it is Autumn and the falling fruit..’. I have forgotten who wrote it now.

I have decided to plant an apple tree in my garden, there are many wonderful trees here but no apple tree. A neighbour suggests a variety called ‘Katy’, sweet and tangy and it grows well in this climate. Katy is the name of my six year old grand daughter so yes, I’ll go for that.

I keep writing poems about ‘my field’ though it isn’t mine, it belongs to John next door.

This Field

I like this field, the way wind
fingers each blade
then ripples them up to the skyline in a single square.

I like the way
the lambs sit on their mothers’ heads
and mob John when he turns up with their feed.

I like his even-handedness, tip sack, spread pellets.
From where I sit he’s in a sea
foamed up by winds from Wetherfell.

I like it when Kath says
the trees are budding up, shows me
green pinpricks on a twig, with May half gone.

Here the becks blether,
Ewes get tupped. Bap, sup, clowt, nowt,
words solid as Whernside.

When cold bites it’s backendish and this field
will curl at the edges, fold in on itself,
wombing me in for the long sleep.

 

Ann Pilling