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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Abi Hughes-Edwards

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Subsoil

I know in Bucks they made bricks.
The hot sulphur of Newton Longville
guaranteed a lungful of warm brown spit.
Childhood was all clay and the worms yellow,
not knowing where the garden ended
and the raw walls began.

It was cold flat winds and vicious litter,
slant elms and a flatten of cereal acres
anchored to thick wet frowns.
The cough, cough, cough and blown light
of the coal tar lamp stroboscoped me:
child - choked old age - child.

There were fossils, stone woodlice forever
foretelling bad weather, scientific gravel
hard with dead cockles, ammonites and trilobites.
Step-grandma Bates, cold in the sun
was nearly there, half stone half whiskers,
lips trombone-cold waiting to be kissed.

We played by the clay pits, bottomless, foul, full
of brontosaurus prints and fishermen's weights.
Trespassers were prosecuted - read drowned;
for occasionally in hot summers one of us would
disappear; heron-like we'd watch the dragging
dipping sick beaks into the saddening carrion found.

I remember the darker green on winter grass
where some animal had changed fur to fluid.
Fertility, though elsewhere the clay held sway
every yard brick hard save the graveyard
where a rich rot of family
left clots of soft soil.

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