by Janine Pulford
Easter Monday 2000: To Mum and Dad
Turbines on the mountain
Beyond the spreading beech tree
Swish in the early morn
As a hearty cockerel
Hails the dawn
Punctuating the perpetual noise from
the rookery
A pheasant’s harsh shrill
Slices the crisp, chill air.
Closed cups of tulips point skywards
And daffodils like silent periscopes
Shake their heads in a tiny breeze
Birdsong bombards the vapour thin air
Melodic blackbirds, cooing doves,
Sweet sounding robins and chaffinches
The endless chatter of starlings and twitter of sparrows
joined now and again by the haunting cry
of a curlew, stark among the fields where swallows fly
And lambs bleat
White blossom weighs heavy on the trees
Flies gather like pin pricks of dust in the warm sunshine
Dogs bark, jackdaws squabble and the cockerel reminds us it’s dawn
Across the timeless green sweep of hills
But even this cacophony cannot hide the echoes from the past
The heavy-footed herd that trod the earth with
Udders swinging and milk bursting forth
Their inquisitive snorts and plaintive bellows
Now consigned, invisible behind stone walls
A plane rumbles deep in the throat of the sky
As turbines turn beyond the spreading beech tree
(written after mad cow disease, BSE, and all the cows that filled the fields in Aughton, Lancashire, had been slaughtered)