Last Stand
He stood, left foot raised against the braced railof the high field's old gate, staring at and through
the folds of hills where the remnants of his stock
steamed, hooves planted in the familiar mud.
Weathered as the gatepost against which he leaned,
the slow and steady rhythm of his world
was from a season long passed, a land that knew
the value of the clay that gave it birth.
In the valley lush pasture breathed its last.
Abundant with cowslip, and dotted with orchid,
its memory stretched over a millennium;
its future lay drowning in planners' ink.
So he stood, forced into betrayal.
His crops of hay exchanged for crops of housing
where heritage existed only
in developers' lurid nomenclature.
Breathing the grass scented air and hearing
the curlew's cry of 'traitor, traitor',
he turned his back and let nature sing
through gurgling brook and waving grass, its last lament.
