PEOPLED: Walking in isolation, Staffordshire, 2020.
Long-listed for Nature in the Air poetry call-out, and featured in: The Gallery of Discovery, Weston Park, Staffordshire

To Orslow first, where Horsa’s people work the land,
who at our approach, stop with hoe and axe in hand
to watch from wooden walls, drawing close with secret
voice and movement their mud-bellied pigs and children,
understandably unsure of this woman in combats,
great hound at her heels and finely wrought stick in hand,
so, I smile, wave, and think these gestures understood
when tilling begins again and unloosed children scatter to play,
hound and me nothing more than disturbances of air on a spring day…
Walk resumed, I pause by a stile to see Orslow’s thatched roofs
fading in cloud and thinks its people left behind, when through a hedge
two children crash with squealing piglet in tow, and without a word
follow hound and me down narrow paths until we come to a place
where water bubbles up from the earth to fill both well and mill pool,
a place where this day others have gathered to see Chad,
come down from Lichfield to preach and bless the sweet water,
but raising a cold trickling in his cupped hands, he halts
at chants of: Ceadda!* coming from a nearby wood, to which place
all now turn, confused that trees should sing, until wraith-like figures
begin to form between branches, their garments grey as oak bark,
and now those surrounding Chad cry: Hréofe! Hréofe!**
their arms thrust out to drive the strangers back to the trees,
until Chad silences the crowd and beckons the strangers,
lifting their grey rags to touch the leprous sores beneath.
And I, who could preach the truth about transmission
and antibiotics to come, can’t stay, and even if I could,
doubt I’d be understood, so turn away from Chadwell,
(so-named from this day) and with hound at heel,
choose the twisting lane to Gatherwynde (where winds meet
and you do not pronounce the ‘d’) but first look back
to see Horsa’s children carrying the squealing piglet home,
their places taken by lepers, who stay with us until
St Mary’s, Blymhill, where gargoyle dogs gape rainwater
onto daffodils, and Green Men grin down from aging oak beams,
exciting my pagan heart and making me forget it is Sunday,
until studded church doors open to disgorge villagers eager for roast beef,
and amongst these, four young women, sisters perhaps,
who share the footpath back to Gatherwynde with us,
a giggling whirl of bonnets and brown curls as they hitch petticoats
to leap a stream, but misjudge the width, and so must stop
to clean four pairs of white-buttoned boots, a task we in our hurry
leave them to do, their fading chatter replaced by song of skylarks,
invisible above the last field home.

*Chad
**lepers