I turned right at the end of our garden path

and hopscotched around bus stops and shops;

the familiar world of numbered houses,   

a hundred makeshift football pitches

and The Pillar of Fire Sunday School

where I studied the science of sowing and reaping.

Worcestershire was to the left and at the crest

of Egg Hill a cluster of beeches planted by Quakers,

The Black Country rampart, a malevolent rodent

squinting askance at Balaam’s Wood, Frogmill Farm

 

and next door to our house, the field where I fed

Jersey cows and watched one day as old man Harris

shovelled their shit into a rusty barrow

to pour upon his vegetable patches.

Saw the farmer and tractor snake up the bushes,

nostrils flaring with indignation,

demanding the thief replace each cowpat

or cough up appropriate compensation.

Harris bent and broke, had some sort of stroke

and his bucket and spade days were finished.

 

The farmer retraced his tracks hard by the hedges

and grimaced at the newly built  motorway stretching

between the farmhouse and the water-butt;

heard the faint but regular whoosh and whoosh,

the blur of vehicles this way and that.

Then the scaffolds went up for three eight-storey flats

that painted long shadows over his pastures

so that every morning, the sun was in hiding

behind Seaton, Pershore and Taunton Towers,

each evening their windows omniscient Gods.

 

Cows no longer grazed and shat, the tractor lay idle,

mechanical diggers gouged and spat the earth flat.

The coup de grace was a concrete and tarmac web

that wound and erased the farmhouse and water-butt.

It was hard to tell in the clamour and dust

if the farmer escaped or else was shut up

beneath a labyrinth of identical houses

where uprooted families are cast for replanting

on pavements peppered with Saturday’s vomit

and nobody bends to pick up the dog shit.