Charles Tomlinson
From Gloucestershire
a letter to Les Murray
I thought of you and your farm down under -
They were shearing sheep here in the valley field.
Three men. They’d brought their women with them.
The men seemed roughish and the women wild.
I thought of your place once more when I heard them speak.
‘Australian?’ I said. ‘New Zealand,’ one replied.
God, how quickly they could strip a sheep
And turn it loose from the fleece it hid inside.
And all sought out their lambs, almost the same
In size, now they had shuffled off that wool,
Stick-legged, kicking jerkily out of it,
Strange in their nakedness, their udders full.
The women folded the fleeces, each as deft
As the sweating shearsmen underneath the trees.
Nuclear Free I read on one of their shirts:
Not joking now, they were civilised in their ease.
At the end of the day one of the men resumed,
‘You always get wrong our accents over here.’
‘How did you come?’ ‘Plane to Los Angeles.
Arizona … Las Vegas … half America.’
Shearsmen and poets travel far these days -
Think of the miles we’d covered when we met
Where dry Judea spreads for the Bedouin
A sparser pasture than our English wet.
The field now is empty of sheep, the migrants gone.
Homebound, they must circle the world again,
Itself a traveller through space and season,
Trailing the wool wisp vapour of their jetplane.
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The