A breath of air

A BREATH OF AIR
© mmSeason

Out from town scents to lungfuls
of unsubtle healthy country
and I remember children's farms at lambing:
indoor muck and mess,
outdoor odours penned with the ewes,
straw-strewn mud receiving blood-streaked babies
bleating and teetering even as their mothers lapped
the wool-veined afterbirth.
I felt for them, heavily couched on muddied straw,
stilled by birthing.
Out now in fresh fields those lambs, leaping
and stop-steppingly grazing, dart
among their unexhausted dams;
one I see alert, stiff-limbed,
sniffing in the air spring
or departing winter.
Or does he smell, across acres,
his cousins' pyre?