Marginal Land
A low, black house
smokes a chain-like plume to moor
the mist which shrouds the sodden peat
on Troughstones, cartooning space
to epitaph the winter sky -
quarried here. they stayed, forever
rooted by sour soil and chapelled minds,
the limits of their lives defined
by drystone walls and wind-bent hedges.
Poor ground and poorer beasts never gave
enough, forced work in mills and mines
which paid in coughs and shortened time.
Trapped on this edge,
Enoch Bailey thought of selling up.
But after the roof-fall killed,
future dissolved into acid earth.
To carry on, his wife took washing
from the rich, delivered it ironed
over wet hill pastures which sucked
their grip on every step
and held the scrawny cows like posts.
A gardener found her dead by the Big House wall.
Inside they dressed in silk shed pressed.
She’d tried to do too much they told the doctor.
Then they wrote the eldest girl a note
to say a shirt was missing, to send it on.
Years later, when they released a field
for building land (where they’ve planted
yellow bricks and concrete tiles), she pinned
the note to the Bill of Sale, as if
it paid for something more, somehow
sweetened the bitter taste of a bad crop.
She pokes the ashes in the new fireplace.
Page(s) 35
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