The Magpie Gavotte

Magpie strutting on the lawn,
a second magpie flutters down
and they face each other,
heads bob,
tails quiver.
The question has been asked –
do you want to dance? –
and answered –
yes-
and so they strut together.

© R Hopkins 2014

Touched by Memory

Grandmother’s grand piano,
dust motes in the sunlit afternoon
scatter on the rosewood lid.
Memory follows the line of light,
places an aspidistra
where the television now stands,
in what was grandma’s room.
The Siamese from Windygates –
otherwise known as number 29 –
prowls among the roses
she planted in nineteen fifty seven.
She never trusted cats.
She trusted no one,
following her betrayal
by the only man she ever loved
in nineteen sixty nine.
Numbers,
cast like runes,
tell her fate.
69 – betrayal
75 – diagnosis
83 – death.
And the grand piano
still remembers
the touch of her fingers

© R Hopkins 2014

Walk at Dusk

Summer visitors do not know this beach.
Solitary stretch of sand and shingle,
low hanging black grey clouds
with dusk tugging at the edges of the sky
at only seven o clock

When the summer visitors return
the beach will wear a face,
less lonely.
For now there is only the dog and I,
two dedicated kite surfers
and the gulls whose cries,
like age old lamentations,
Are not enough to fill
the grand emptiness.

October Afternoon

Louring blue black sky,
foraging crows black against green grass
of fieldsl awaiting the plough’s first kiss.
Ramshackle barn of corrugated tin,
dulled silver and orange rust ,
and further away the red tiled roofs
of Collingwood naval base.
On the far edge of the field silver pylons,
like giants with arms spread in supplication
to strange gods.
And the only sounds are the voices of the wind,
telling the stories it alone knows,
and the whisper rustle of the grass
brushing against my boots.

September 2013

A murmuration of starlings rises from the field,
dark specks against the blue black sky.
Playing avian follow my leader,
they rise and fall in perfect formation,
the only moving things in the still, late autumn landscape.

Seascape

In the eldritch half-light,

herald of coming darkness,

we leave the road

and descend.

A stony staircase,

a muddy footpath,

the empty beach

in the gloaming.

Standing motionless on a shingle bank,

momentarily one with

the magnificent solitude

of pebbles, grey and the ebbing

shushing sea.

The lights on the distant island

and over at Fawley refinery

alone attest to life

as we mark our homeward path

with a track of boot and paw prints

in the sand,

till a blackbird begins to pipe his farewell

to the day

in clear sharp notes

that make a cleft in the silence.

Connections

Notebook recalls,
long ago train journeys
meetings with time faded lovers,
places and people to be filed under Then.
One curve in the arc of a life
that comes to rest in this quiet lamp lit room,
in the moment of now.

Lineage

This piece gave led to writing a more detailed account of my rural childhood in the 60’s and early 70’s.  Go here to read extracts.

He worked as a stockman and general hand on the farms
of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, using tools and methods that
would not have been entirely unfamiliar to his great-grandfather.
And we, his children, grew up with the farm buildings and the
surrounding lanes and fields as our playground,
thinking nothing of the fact that the nearest town of any size
was half an hour away by bus,
thinking nothing of no mod cons.
Mum did the laundry in an old copper,
dad grew all our vegetables in the garden,
the house was heated by open fires
and we only had an inside loo just after I was born in ’57.
But we knew the name of every bird and tree and plant,
we knew where to go to watch foxes on a summer evening,
and knew, too, the difference between a plough and a harrow.

Today, reading my brother’s description of his childhood,
I realised how much we were shaped by that rural landscape,
as surely as the farmers shaped the land itself.
All those places, like the farms where dad worked,
are gone now,
the farm machinery of that time become museum pieces,
mass production doesn’t allow for the slow and seasonal life we knew.
It all leaves us with a sense of dispossession,
like a tribal people driven from their territory,
making compromises so that we can say
the word home.

Stubbington Park Mid Morning.

After the children are in school,

and the sorority of Dog Walking Mothers

has dispersed,

the park waits,

like a house prepared for visitors

yet to arrive.

Empty benches invite no one.

The horse chestnut trees,

turning crisp gold,

drop their harvest of dark brown conkers

onto the grass where, later,

they will be discovered

by small, curious hands.

Gulls investigating litter

stalk the perimeter

of the chained off cricket pitch.

Crows pick their way across the grass,

solemn, stately as Elizabethan courtiers.

Nothing else moves.

Then the old man with the little Papillion,

comes from the path beside the community centre,

a child runs into the playground, climbs the slide,

and a terrier splits the morning silence

with a delighted bark

as she goes in pursuit of her ball.

Still the park wears its air of waiting.

The Hawk

 

As I turned the corner I saw the bird standing under the trees,
grey,hunched, motionless.
I thought at first it was a heron,
telescopically shrunk into itself,
though this is not the type of country for herons.
The bird took flight and I saw from the markings it was a goshawk.
The other birds saw it, flying low across the field,
and in a terrified, twittering mass
took off from their roosts in the wood
like an army in rout.
I looked back at the far end of the path
in the centre of the field, the goshawk stood alone
lordly and keenly observant.