Fields (from 1987)

Where seagulls on the sea breeze rise,

On gilded wing I see them glide;

Blue of heaven in Kentish skies,

White-edged the rolling, breaking tide.

And Shakespeare's Cliff who's rising peak,

Steals the scene yet cannot speak,

Of when he felt the channel edge,

When she was young, and he a ledge.

Behind him writes the countryside,

An April poem that she contrived,

In gentle lines that Kent supplied,

And nature's verse so vast and wide.

And through all this they plan to build,

Through thriving hedge and meadow field;

Their bon accord and toasting glass,

Rewrites for Kent an epitaph:

Roaming wind what you now caress

Are barley fields, now barley-less,

The field mouse that we laid to rest,

With hawthorn hedge and chaffinch nest.

Silent skylark, no field woodrush,

Meadow vetchling nor mistle thrush.

But for the mole, there is mankind,

With eyes that see, yet still is blind.