The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working

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1967, chimney, clouds, corn, cows, dusk, eggs, elm, farming, fence, fields, flood, food distribution, future, gale, gaze, green, grey, harvest, hay, hills, identity, leaf, letter, machines, meadow, meat production, Michael J Redford, milk, morning, oats, poetry, rain, sheep, silence, summer, sun, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, tractors, trees, valley, weather, wheat, wind, windows, work, writing

Chapter 4

Working

A Letter of Two Parts

Dear Pat and John

I thought it high time I dropped another letter from the country into the post.   Looking back over the past summer months seems more like looking back over a bleak and stormy winter.   The weather has of course played havoc with the haymaking and harvesting.   I hear that at one time, medium quality hay was fetching nearly £20 per ton, and taking into account the wide-spread flooding that has occurred, it seems there’ll not be enough oat straw to feed in place of it.   With this drastic shortage of hay and straw, the outlook is black indeed.

Even as I write, the rain is beating alarmingly against the window panes, borne upon a gale that roars like an express up the valley, each gust falling over the next in its haste to wreak havoc on the exposed hills.   As I gaze through the window pane distorted with rivulets and splashes, I perceive a hazy image of grey hills shouldering leaden clouds, and every few minutes the wind rattles the frame and comes sighing down the chimney.   The whole house shudders a little and a log in the hearth slips, sending up a shower of sparks to meet the confusion above.   The fields are in a sorry state.   Most of the corn has been lodged as if trampled by some strident giant, fences have been breached by falling trees and many sheep throughout the country have been drowned in the spreading waters.

There was a period two weeks ago when the tempest eased a little and allowed a little watery sun into our eyes, but this lasted for only seven days, after which the rain set in again and eased up only occasionally for an odd day here and there.   We have managed to stack about half the oats, but the remainder will probably have to be written off.   The wheat would have encountered a similar fate had it not been for the three hired combines.

Now here once again are the winds and the rains.   A dead leaf, too sodden to absorb any more water is whipped across the window and trembles for a brief second on the sill before joining the hosts that cling to the chicken coop wire.   Incidentally, I’d better put this letter to one side for a moment in order to collect the eggs before the half light fades completely.

                                * * * * * * * *

Dear Pat and John,

I’ve had to restart this letter.   Owing to this sudden bright spell we’ve been working like mad trying to catch up on the backlog of harvesting and general repairs.   I started this letter well over two weeks ago but I’m afraid I’ve not had time to finish it until now.   It is remarkable how the view has changed outside my window.   The country scene these past few days has been one of violent human and mechanical activity.

Implements of all shapes, sizes and colours have erupted from their unusual passiveness and are droning, roaring and rattling over the soil.   A combine harvester, like a metal monster from a Wells novel, trundles ponderously across the field, digesting the grain and vomiting the residue in its wake.   Tractors career madly through the lanes, heave with throbbing effort towering loads of sheaves and haul balers which follow on, nodding idiotically like inane sheep.   Men race fervently against time commanding machines, pitching sheaves, building stacks, their pitchforks leaping and flashing under the sun.   Farmers and farm workers alike are conscious of the urgency of the hour, but no clock watching for them, they are eager to see the culmination of a years’ hard work.   To these men, their work is not merely a means of earning a living, it is something far more than this, something far more personal and important to them as individuals.   These men work not so much for their employers but with them, and it is through this combined effort that the tempestuous vagaries of the past year have been overcome.

If a machine breaks down, there is a curse and several pairs of hands are immediately locating the trouble.   They may not be expert mechanics but farm workers are masters of improvisation and no machine is standing idle for long.   It is this knack of ‘making do’ that is the seed of many weird and wonderful machines that have appeared on the agricultural scene, and it would indeed be difficult to find any industry which has produced in such a short period of time a greater range of impossible machines to tackle such improbable tasks.   No doubt to the layman it would appear that with all these modern innovations, the life of the farm worker today is almost as idyllic as the sentimentalised conception of the pseudo-bucolic poets of the seventeenth century:-

                “O happy life, if that their good
                The husbandman but understood.
                Who all the day themselves do please …”

Whenever a new acquaintance asks the nature of my work they are, on being told, shocked into silent disbelief.   Apparently I neither look like a farm labourer nor do I sound like one (how does such a person look and sound), and henceforth I am re-introduced either as a farmer or, by those who are more sensitive towards the truth, as being ‘in farming’, thereby implying that I own vast acres and hunt every Tuesday and Saturday.   A wistful ‘back to the land’ look then enters the eye.   “I’ve always wanted to work on a farm” they sigh.   No doubt there have been insuperable obstacles in ambition’s path for many people, but surely not all, and I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t bemoan his lot in town and gaze longingly at the green hills.   And just as a point of interest, I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t have an uncle somewhere who owns a farm.

Their conception of farming today seems even more idyllic than that of their fathers’.   Machines, they say, have taken the hard work out of farming, all we have to do is sit on a tractor all day and press buttons.   Perhaps they would like to spend a day stacking bales of hay under a sizzling hot roof of a Dutch barn, or perhaps after a sixteen hour day during harvest, [perhaps] they would like to sit up all night with a cow who is having a difficult time calving and work another sixteen hours the following day, and the day after that.   Unless a farmer specialises in a line for which a particular machine or implement has been designed, then it is not economical to purchase that machine.   For example, a man with just one house cow would find it uneconomical to install a completely automatic milking unit, but even where this is justified, as in the case of larger herds, the farmer or herdsman still has to rise at five o’clock on a bitterly cold winter’s morning seven days a week.   The advent of the machine has not necessarily lessened the amount of hard work to be done, it has merely allowed us to do more work in a given amount of time.   In fact, it is because of the machine that the herdsman’s lot today is becoming an increasingly intolerable one.

An old friend of mine once milked twenty five cows night and morning with two machines.   He know his cows and his cows knew him.   Although he did not rush things, he was efficient.   He would stand aside as the cows came into the shed and cast his eye over each one, and as he milked, he ran his hand over their coats and looked at their droppings.   Old Charlie could tell immediately if one of the animals was off colour.   Then his employer retired and a young, progressive farmer moved in.   Fortunately he ask Charlie to stay on as cowman.   Now, Charlie milks sixty cows night and morning with four machines in a well-parlour.   On being asked how he liked the new system, the old cowman sighed.

“Well I dunno.   We gets the milk, that’s fer sure, but ‘tis like working in a factory.   There’s pipes, tubes, valves, taps an’ switches everywhere.   The animals go through the parlour like a dose o’ salts – you’ve ‘ardly got time to wash their bags.   All you can see of ‘em is one side, their guts might be ‘anging out the other fer all I know.”   His addendum, I think, summed up his real grievance.

                “Trouble is – I ‘ent got enough time to get to know me animals.”

What could once be classified as a pleasurable occupation was now, through the advent of the machine, become a tiresome chore, and as mechanisation infiltrates more and more, so true herdsmanship is disappearing.   The reticent paragon of tolerance, that slow, amiable patient being that was once the cowmen, is now being pushed aside to make way for the impatient, ulcer-ridden milker of high speed conveyer-type milk production of today, so much so in fact, that on some larger farms, milkers are already working a shift system to break the seven day a week monotony.

I can foresee in the not so distant future, a herd of a thousand or more cows, zero grazed, moving almost continuously through a system of yards and parlours twice every twenty four hours.   In the parlours, shift work will be in progress with round the clock milking.   The milk will be pumped through to the distribution.   The organisation will manufacture its own concentrates, will employ its own veterinary surgeon, accountant and secretary and will have a resident Ministry Inspector equipped with his own laboratory.   And of course the whole concern will be owned by the big industrialists of the day.   This is not such an improbability as may at first appear for this has already happened to a great degree to some of our poultry farms.   There are now vast empires where eggs are fed into one end of a building and emerge twelve weeks later at the other as pre-packed chickens with their giblets frozen into little polythene bags inside them.   Then there is the abomination of the sweat box and battery systems of meat production.   Agricultural evolution has reached a point where farming, as we know it, is slowly but surely plunging into self-annihilation and dragging down with it the responsibility of moral thought into a morass of turpitude.   We are entering an age of hydroponic systems where an agricultural technocracy permits controlled environment and mass production of living creatures to an extent unparalleled in human history.   It is as if we have forgotten that we are dealing with life itself and not inanimate lumps of putty waiting to be moulded into any shape by the current market.   Yet if the farmers of today do not keep abreast of [the] latest scientific developments, they would find it almost impossible to feed themselves let alone provide food for others.   Even so, despite the fact that agricultural efficiency and production have increased beyond the wildest dreams of great pioneers such as John Lawes and Sir Humphry Davy, people are still dying in their thousands for want of food.   Despite the fact that there is enough food produced throughout the world in any one year to supply mankind with the essentials of life for the next twenty, the bloated belly of the beggar is still a common sight in the greater part of the world.   It is not, therefore, research into agricultural production methods which is urgently needed, but research into the distribution of those products.   It is in this sphere that the great fields of ignorance lay.

But let me rein back awhile for I have digressed too far.   This letter to you was intended to be a portrait of the countryside as I have seen it during the last two months, so now let me gaze upon the pastoral scene beyond my window.   The cows have finished grazing and are lying in the meadow cudding methodically.   The sun falls upon their backs like a warm blanket and a faint breeze fans their faces.

It was nine o’clock last night that the last load was brought home.   Engines were switched off one by one across the fields and, as the evening star faded, Pegasus shimmered the in the warmth of dusk and gazed upon the southern elms.   As the last sheaf was laid upon the stack, the year ended, our year, that is.   George stood, hands on hips.   Harry leaned upon his pitchfork.   Alf and Arthur sat upon the trailer and Jim stood with one foot upon the wheel hub.   In silence they gazed at the stack, each man with his own thoughts, each man reaping his own spiritual harvest.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

^{————w}(O)_{rmholes________________________________|—–}

chimney wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
clouds & identity & time & wind wormhole: travelling // arrival
green wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
grey wormhole: for / the first time
hills & valley wormhole: volcanic rock
morning wormhole: forgotten anything
poetry wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
rain wormhole: when the rain has settled / the dust
silence wormhole: without any buffet at all
sun wormhole: is this it // all the time
thought & writing wormhole: Christmas 2015
trees wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
windows wormhole: river
work wormhole: I am not yet ready

 

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                from
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^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blue wormhole: vastly
brown & clouds & echo & rain wormhole: Open – All – Ours
field wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – The Agricultural Show
green wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
passing & walking wormhole: Luton // couldn’t make a poem out of it
white wormhole: 1967

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Safe Home

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cars, celebration, city, community, commuting, countryside, evening, eyes, field, harvest, history, industry, life, Longfellow, Michael J Redford, morning, Nag's Head, pipe, pub, Ramsden Heath, smoke, speech, sun, table, talking, the Boats of Vallisneria, tv, village, walking, wheat, windows, work

Safe Home

“Drift from the land continues.”   Thus was I informed by the ‘Farmer’s Weekly’ one Friday morning as it lay open on the breakfast table.   This drift from the land affects not only agriculture but also the structure of the village community.   Of those who leave the land, many also leave the village their forefathers had inhabited for generations and go to the towns to find employment in industry, and of those who stay, most become commuters and spend most of their lives working in and travelling to and from the city.   It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to find the Coopers or the Charmans, the Thatchers or the Reeves whose descendants had practised their crafts in the same village for centuries, and I am saddened at the thought of these links, these direct human links with the past slowly withering away.   Of the hosts who patronise my own local pub, there are but five or six who are connected in some way with farming or country life.   The normal topics of conversation (apart from the usual British subjects of cricket and the weather) are now the trials and tribulations of a day at the office, the trouble one has had with the car or the recently installed central heating system and a somewhat heated discussion on ‘That’ programme on telly last night.

The truly rural community is not only dwindling but is also being diluted by the absorption of the townsman in the form of new towns and from the expanding ring of the more prosperous classes as they move out further and further from their place of work as life in the city becomes more and more intolerable.

A small but interesting side effect of this movement of the population can be noted not only in the topic of conversation, but also in the mode of dress.   At one time it was only the more prosperous members of the community who could afford smart suits of fine materials and were able to drive around in ostentatious cars while the remainder had to make do with serge or rough tweed or any hard wearing material which could weather many winters.   Now, prosperity has increased to such a degree that, on a Saturday evening, the car park of the Nag’s Head is full of shining cars none of which I swear is over five years old, while inside silk rubs shoulders with worsted.   What is left of the local gentry now distinguishes itself by arriving at the pub in a battered Land Rover covered in muck and mud and dressing in rough tweeds and cords, and if it were not for his public school accent, he could quite easily be mistaken for a tramp.   You will find him mostly in the public bar playing dominoes or cribbage and drinking pints of bitter while his city cousins monopolise the saloon discussing the affairs of the day over a scotch and dry.   No matter how affluent the society or how adamant is one’s denial of the existence of ‘class’, the differences will always be there to be seen.

One such a tramp visited me yesterday to confirm some arrangements with regard to the harvest festival.   He was a man of my grandfather’s generation who had lived in the village in pre-dilution days.   The common bond of farming had drawn us together when I first visited the Nag’s Head in Ramsden Heath, and ever since we have discussed, gesticulated and argued about farming, I, learning something from his methods and he (I am vain enough to assume) learning something from mine.   So it was that two tramps (and I call myself a tramp simply because I had not yet changed from my working clothes, not because I make claim to being part of the local heritage) sat at an open window one late summer’s eve discussing and reminiscing about the harvest.   The heat of the day had left its mark upon the still air and golden rays slanted through the window picking out the curling smoke from my friend’s pipe before it disappeared into the gloom above.   His eyes ascended with the smoke and his thoughts went with them.

“`Course it’s not the same now – never will be, harvest has lost most of its true meaning.   Today it has become merely another chore that has to be dealt with.”

I thought of the congregation that would attend the little grey church on Sunday.   Ninety percent of them would be townsmen whose only connection with harvest is the bread roll eaten at their game of bridge.   My friend was speaking again.

“Nowadays the only people conscious of harvest home are those who reap it and of those few involved, only a fraction are aware of the full solemnity of the occasion.”

That’s true.   In the days of scythes and flails, even up to the time of the threshing machine, harvest time, that milestone of true country life, was steep in ceremony.   First a ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’ of the harvest would be elected to lead the reapers into the field.   This was a solemn occasion for the sweat, toil and the blistering work was still ahead of them.   The long days of drudgery passed slowly as acre by acre the long stems fell to the scythe and backs bent continually cutting, gathering, binding and stooking.   Finally, upon the last day and in the center of the last acre stood the last sheaf.   If one man was to reap this final sheaf alone, he would be courting disaster.   The entire company therefore, would gather round and, at a signal form the ‘Lord’ or the ‘Lady’ (depending upon local custom), they would all hurl their hooks at the few remaining stems.   The corn dolly would then be woven to appease the spirits, then the back slapping and the chasing and kissing of the girls would begin.   More merriment would take place that evening when the whole company would assemble at the farmhouse for refreshment in the form of rough (very rough) cider and ale.

When the crop was fit for carrying and the last load had been carted in from the fields led by the ‘Lady’ of the harvest, then would come the harvest supper with its eating, drinking, toasting and singing, and soon after, the gleaning bell would ring out across the still fields.

There is always a stillness in the fields when harvest is over and yesterday was no exception.   There was such a calm in fact, that as the old gentleman opposite me knocked out his pipe on the window sill, our Jersey heifer Molly, who lay half asleep on the other side of the hoppit, turned her brown face lazily in our direction.   Nowadays there is no ceremony.   Like most milestones, harvest has been enveloped in the growth of progress and forgotten.   The old man spoke again.

“Of course harvest was of greater significance in those days, for if harvest was poor, hardship and deprivation would be the farmworker’s constant companion throughout the year, that’s why there was such joy and genuine thanksgiving when the crop was safe home.”

I received a mental picture of a field heavy with ripened wheat, the hard fat grains shimmering in the heat of summer and gold sheathed stems, faint bowed by heavy heads, stood as if they themselves were in prayer.   Then I saw beneath this deeply moving scene, the reality of sweat and toil, of aching backs, parched throats and calloused hands.   And yet the workers could still infuse a gaiety into the drudgery; even at the end of the last long day, they still had energy to laugh and sing and chase the girls across the fields.   Although there is still much hard work to be done at harvest time, the worker’s nagging fear of a crop failure is gone; the direct contact between harvester and Mother Earth has been severed and much of the toil has disappeared – but then so has much of the gaiety.

My old friend stood up and stretched.

“Even if it was a bad harvest,” he said glancing at his watch, (it was two hours past opening time), “there would always be a sheaf put to one side for the festival, partly as thanksgiving for that already received, no matter how little this might be, and partly as a prayer for the future.”

I took down my leather-bound jacket from the back door and thought of Longfellow’s words: ‘Like flames upon the alter shine the sheaves,’ flames that took a year to kindle, a year of energy which, if funnelled into a second, could move a mountain.

Strolling towards the Nag’s Head in the cool, green evening, my face stinging from the noon day sun, I suddenly remembered something.

“By the way,” I said, “what exactly was it you came to see me about?”

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

cars wormhole: Life on Mars? – poewieview #31
city wormhole: tired
evening wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – moment
eyes & speech wormhole: coagulating
field & sun wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
history wormhole: ‘hope for things to come’
life wormhole: chartless …
morning & walking wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – gull circling out at sea
Ramsden Heath wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Olly
smoke wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
table wormhole: what life went on
talking wormhole: my seat // now
tv wormhole: “Darling” – poewieview #28
windows wormhole: the purple mist between
work wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – mmpph’

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn

Tags

2016, Africa, air, autumn, book, colour, digging, earth, emerald, eyes, faces, field, garden, gold, grass, hill, horse, lawn, life, lunch, morning, peas, plough, poetry, reading, sky, skyline, sleep, sound, spiders, starlings, sun, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, trees, uncle, wheat

 

 

 

autumn

                young wheat and emerald, in sese vertitur annus,
                reading an old poet in the garden, the sky is clear as face –

                                I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch
                                and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared –

                                                              on the steep hill opposite a horse pulled forward from a plough
                                                              moving slowly towards the skyline, jingle of the traces,

                                the book fell, the starlings flew, suddenly, I came awake
                                as the plough turned the field and spark of sunlight leapt,

                shoulder to mine eye, while the earth lay opened and dark-folded;
                                              (visitors had arrived, in quietude, invasion of linyphiids,

                                                              a thin gossamer between ridges – lapping under the sun –
                                                              bristles of random colour, a hundred yards long

                                                              and twenty inches wide and bare of future gold);
                                among the nemesia the book is retrieved, many lives

                                              will be lost, just enough will be saved, restless; this is
                                              thistle-down upon the air, here are crackle and pop

                                                                                 beneath the sky; the tree tops will be dipped in
                                                                                 old gold, and the swallows will be off for Africa

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to : The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & autumn & eyes & field & garden & gold & morning & poetry & reading & sky & skyline & sleep & sunlight & trees wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
faces wormhole: a theremin note – poewieview #21
life & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion
sound wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
sun wormhole: between thoughts

 

The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

Tags

1967, Africa, afternoon, air, Apollo, autumn, awakening, beans, bees, beginning, birth, blue, book, bracken, bronze, caterpillar, child, colour, cottage, crickets, dark, death, digging, earth, emerald, end, eyes, face, field, flowers, forest, garden, generation, gold, gorse, grass, hazel, hedgehog, hill, hive, honeysuckle, horse, house martin, ivy, January, journey, joy, lambs, land, lawn, leaves, life, March, memory, migration, mind, moorhen, moorland, morning, mother, nemesia, Norway, oak, plough, poetry, purple, reading, redwing, sadness, seasons, seeds, silence, sitting, sky, skyline, sleep, smell, sound, spiders, starlings, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, thistles, thought, time, transition, trees, uncle, valley, web, wheat, winter, woodlark, work

 

Chapter 1

The Wandering Mind

Autumn Thoughts

I sat in the garden one autumn afternoon reading an old poet.   The sky was unblemished, clear and pure as the face of a child and starlings were deep in conversation close by.   I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared.   After this exertion and a good meal, I felt no pang of conscience as I turned my back upon the many other chores that cried for attention and took my book into the garden and relaxed in the warm soporific scent of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass.   After an indeterminable period my thoughts were lifted from the page upon my knee and I drifted across the valley to the hill opposite.   There the grade was steep, too steep for tractor or any other mechanical tool.   A horse therefore was leaning from a plough, moving slowly, almost imperceptively towards the skyline.   The cottage in which I then lived was very old and the hills opposite even older; no doubt at one time they were covered with forest, but many men must have witnessed that same scene before me, many men and many generations.   To them it was a common sight, but to me it was a rare and beautiful sight that spanned the centuries. The scene was timeless.

I felt my head nod forward quite suddenly and I came awake.   The book fell onto the grass and the starlings flew off more in indignation than fright.   In the silence that followed, there filtered through the warmth of the valley the faint jingle of the traces, and as the plough turned upon the headland, a spark of sunlight leapt from the polished harness; it was an impish child of Apollo that danced upon the horse’s back one moment, then without warning, leapt the great expanse of the valley and entered my eye within the same split second.   I realised then that here was a beginning; here, before the old year was done, was another just starting.   Here the earth was being opened up to let in winter’s icy fingers so that she might the better prepare the seed bed for next year’s crop.   Then as the mind’s awareness expanded, I felt that this was not the only beginning taking place, there were many more throughout the changing land.

Visitors were arriving, flowers were blooming, animals were being born.   All about me, as I sat half asleep in the quietude, a great movement of life was in progress, and I thought of another great movement of life that had occurred the previous autumn.   It was an invasion of our fields by the linyphiids or gossamer spiders.   We were drilling wheat at the time and as I crouched low on the footboard of the drill to clear a coulter that had clogged up, I beheld a silken counterpane of gossamer stretched between the faint ridges of the harrowed earth.   The effect, if the eye was held low enough, was that of a thin layer of water shimmering in the early morning sun sending off sparks of individual colour selected at random from all parts of the spectrum.   So taken was I with this scene that all thoughts of clearing the coulters left me as we rattled and jogged across the field, and when harvesting the same field this year, there, as a reminder of that small moment, was a strip bare of swaying gold a hundred yards long and twenty inches wide.

I retrieved the book and placed it on the seat beside me.   The starlings had returned and were even noisier than before and the bees were hurrying to and fro among the nemesia in the hope of collecting and storing that little extra for the months ahead.   Soon they will end their toil; soon they would maim and expel the unfortunate drones and retire to the centre of the hive with the queen in their midst.   The day was magnificent, more like mid-summer than autumn, small wonder indeed that the careless cricket continued to ‘sing’ unaware of the imminent peril of winter.   Many small lives will be lost in the approaching days of darkness yet, through it all, just enough will be saved.   Beneath the apparent calm of autumn is a restlessness; and urgency sweeps through the fields and woodlands as the wiser creatures prepare for flight or lay in stores for sustenance through the long twilight of winter yet to come.

Autumn is a season of transition, a season of intense activity; of flowers flowering and flowers dying, of drilling wheat and cutting beans.   Autumn is a time of birth and death; a time of awakening and a time of going to sleep.   It is a time for the young and a time for the old, a time of both joy and sadness.

This is the time of thistle-down upon the air and goose-grass burrs upon the stockings; when the gorse and broom crackle and pop beneath a March-blue sky and scatter their tiny seeds among the dry stems of the sapless grass.   Now the moors are stained a deeper purple, bracken becomes bronzed and the tree tops dipped in old gold.   In the derries the young caterpillar of the Purple Emperor wraps itself in dead oak leaves and sleeps until the great awakening.   When gossamer fills the air and hazel nuts turn brown the young swallows start on that amazing flight to the shores of Africa, a journey undertaken by their parents a year before who, curiously enough, do not show their offspring the way, but follow on some days later.   How many thousand autumns have witnessed this exodus?   Yet to what blocks of logic and fact can we in all our wisdom attribute this common thing.   The redwing and fieldfare arrive from Norway urging on the lingering house martin.   The woodlark sings, the ivy flowers and the honeysuckle blooms again.   And as the somnolent hedgehog rolls himself in his blanket of leaves, the last brood of moorhen is hatched.   Something sleeps, something awakes; something dies, something is born.

There is no real beginning or end to the year.   Even on the first of January the lambs are growing; leaves are forming within the bud and the young wheat carpets the bare fields with emerald.   But for those whose minds cannot accept the existence of that which has no beginning and no end, then let the division between the years be drawn through autumn, for the onset of winter is really the beginning of the year, not the end.   The young year is born into a cold and sometimes frightening world just as the infant child is released from the warm security of the mother’s womb, and like the child, the infant year begins its life before it is born.   It begins in the womb of autumn.   It is here then (if anywhere) that one thing ends and another begins.   It is here In Sese Vertiture Annus.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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1967 & garden & life & mind & thought & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
afternoon wormhole: “walking …”
air & sound & time wormhole: constant hummm
autumn & gold & sky & smell & trees & work wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
blue & reading wormhole: between thoughts
child & sleep wormhole: 1968
death & eyes wormhole: too late:
field & skyline wormhole: impressionism
leaves wormhole: work
morning wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
mother wormhole: and that’s where I are
oak wormhole: dog bark
poetry wormhole: after all?
purple wormhole: 1967
silence wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
sitting wormhole: zero
winter wormhole: 1963