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Wayne Burrows

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Wheatfield

after Nesta Wyn Jones

Today, the whole and radiant sky
seems leaning, poised
on the docile calm
of a blackberry bush.
It is blue and glacial,
rocks on its heel
in the flattened grass
where I lick dark juices
from my finger-ends.
Far-off, all heat-haze
and yellow dust, a blond child
ransacks the picnic box,
her pale blue, gold-freckled eyes alight,
her stumblings precarious,
no weight on her feet.
Should I, like her
in the light of this, dance across
ears of swaying wheat
like the erratic
flickering cabbage-white,
leave undisturbed the brown-furred
mice at their roots,
all the stalks unbent,
till I reach her, only to find
her safe? Or, being closer,
should I leave her be,
stay content to stretch my limbs
in the autumn heat,
watch the day’s wheat-stalk
wilt in my palm
then keep it, to show her,
on her return?

 

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