Andrew Geary
A Fenland Harvest
Driving at night by fields fetched from the sea-bed,
dried in the stiff east winds and sown with wheat
that gleams in moonlight like a seam of coal,
I am surprised to see, so late,
flotillas of lights, to left and right,
great clouds of dust like dancing swarms of locusts
around the lamps of combine harvesters
working the fine weather.
To return by the same road next day
and see the hay bales strewn about the fields
like giant wooden cotton reels
and a played-out chequered board of stubble stretching
far as the eye can see
is to believe harvest is magical,
a game with Mother Earth she lets us win,
yesterday’s rural idyll.
But all those lights and wheels so late at night
call to mind the industry of a pit-head,
surface sign of something seriously big,
and there are shifts of workers in the city
taking lifts to many different levels,
going to hidden faces, narrow employments,
lives kept busy bringing up the millions
that lie invested in these fenland fields.
Andrew Geary is an accountant living in Hertfordshire. His poems have been published in Smiths Knoll, Envoi and elsewhere.
Page(s) 75
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