Riptide Journal, the Exeter Uni literary magazine, has themed their 2020 edition around Climate Matters to tie in with a series of seminars taking place virtually this year. I’m honoured they’ve chosen to include my poem The Rewilding of Stonelands Farm in the publication. They also asked if I’d make a video reading to accompany it and to be shown during one of the seminars — so I put this together using photos taken locally in Devon. For some years I’ve taken to photographing fly-tipped sofas and images of rural decay, well a man has to have a hobby doesn’t he?
See this:
a red flatbed marooned in slurry.
A perished tyre up on top
of a rusted Peugeot raised on blocks.
A green trailer laden with sodden logs.
Last night’s storm has passed
and everything steams
as if the world is being poached.
A squirrel shuffles hazels,
clanging the galvanised tin
of a purposeless shed.
At the island end
of a waterlogged paddock
five black heifers wait
for nothing they can name.
Mystery machinery
corrodes against stone,
caught by surprise
when the iron plague came.
On a yellow skip throne
a one horned quad bike
rules this junk and rubble kingdom.
Behind a high fence,
something happened
the Planners wouldn't like.
A snapped sign says:
Private Kee
Nothing moves. I wait
and nothing moves again.
The Earth is readying itself
to accept a death, the slow
disassembly of molecules.
See this: empty pubs, silent schools.
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