'three blanketed horses graze in radio-silence' Photo: by Janko Ferli on Unsplash
Armistice
Poem by Jonathan Wooding
On the high field, battle-green and bracken-amber,
three blanketed horses graze
in radio-silence and doubting light.
In my garden, saw-flies cling to a lingering
white hogweed, where ash and oak
tango and rattle in scarlet billows
as rooks abandon ships, and burnt and gold
horse chestnut leaves palm out frailty,
skulking and scuttering a winter’s song
for one windshook shtetl in the nick of time.
I have come to garden’s end for the Armistice –
see mossed builders’ rubble, cracked tiles,
eroded bricks, roll of wire fencing (netting
leaves like fish), warped and crumbled
corrugated sheets, rusted lengths of pipe,
last year’s Christmas tree. This is
BBC News at two minutes past eleven.
I look again, palms out too in frailty,
see unripened berries – pale green –
pairing pecked and rotted familial blackberries,
their white and lilac flowers open.
