Blues

The evening
Curls in
Like a lip
At a cup.
The last drop
Of day hangs
Then is gone
Over the horizon's tongue.

Walking in the fields at dusk
I see a teacup's curve,
broken
white catches the moon's echo
blue pattern bright as speedwells
in Summer.
I pick it up;
cold grained mud
clags its chapped glaze.
I wipe it.
smooth
trying to conjure its past.
The last hand
to touch it
might now lie
as chill and fragmented
in the churchyard
up the road
forgotten as
the once treasured
whole swell
of fragile
Sunday best china.
I think of the church:
lilies from the manor's glass house
(when I was little
I thought the angels sent them)
and tall sunbeams
flocked with dust.
Of how iit was like visiting old uncles
because you weren't aloud to talk.
Then the Rector would begin
his sermon
about the people who'd lived here before
and how they were part of the land
and somehow I came to believe
that God was the earth and weather,
the sun coming through the windows
was His hand
reaching like mine into my dolls'house.
Then we'd sing
among the grown up voices
saplings in a forest
and I'd feel time's chain
holding me in
and stopping me falling.
And after, when we came ouside
it was so much bigger -
the past behind
and future before
and the fields cupping
the moment always.

Now these fields
are on borrowed time:
their fate
is on the other side of the hedge
where lorries growl;
the air is thick
with deisel smoke
and rotting -
no chaste china
for the waste
of my generation
who never thinks
of barely enough
as being somethiing to be thankful for.
We've only enough
if there's some left over.
The rooks squabble
for the gobbling of spoils
drawn from the bran tub
of this land fill site.
But rubbish cannot fill
the heart made derilict
by the need for sand to make bricks.
And it will never be quiet
while the hiss
of methane burning
blue
sprouts from the poisoned soil -
an unwanted harvest:
"As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
No child will believe
God lived
here