Ann Pilling

Last Sunday was Remembrance Day. In the Dales this is marked by the usual church services, outdoor services round village war memorials,brass bands; and the slow reading aloud of the names of all the dead who fell in the two world wars. In Wensleydale the names are so familiar, Iveson, Fawcett, Dinsdale, Cockett, Whaley. The Whaleys lived in my house for four generations and two of them walked across our threshhold to their deaths. My poem 'Haytiming' recalls their sacrifice:

Haytiming

Through closed car windows all the way home
I smelt hay, its thin sweet fragrance.
They worked all yesterday

and some already lies in long green bricks
on bristly fields, the rest like swathes of hair
still waits for the machine.

I step across our threshold
'Virtute not verbis' spelt in tiles
and think of old Julys

of men who walked out of this house
to the Somme, to Caen;
up this lane a boy brought telegrams.

I climb steadily, going west,
to a shaved meadow where the dog
careers about, tossing the loose hay.

Below, the quilted land thrums with mowing
while a horse big enough to pull gun carriages
sleeps in the shade.

Ann Pilling

This poem appears in my new collection, 'The Dancing Sailors' which is published tomorrow (November 21st) by Indigo Dreams Publishing.

For information go to www.indigodreamsbookshop.com and go to 'our authors' and to Ann Pilling. The book can be ordered from them or from any bookshop.

When you 'say goodbye' to a book and it is published at last it is like giving birth. You have to 'let go' of the thing that has been growing inside you for so long. One can feel rather flat until the 'feedback' comes in..but I have loved putting this book together.

Enjoy!