Potato Pickers

 

Rattling wagon,

Glutted with earthy potatoes -

Overspill rolls,

Elliptically in gutter.

Freshly plucked, damp,

Dirtily bouncing and jumbled,

Scenting the air

With warm, muddily fragranced notes.

Rose tinted, I drift

Into childhood retrospection.

My brother and me,

Early, waiting at the roads end –

Outfit of old clothes,

Boots; sandwiches, bottle of pop.

Tractor collects us;

We scramble into the trailer,

Squeeze into the throng.

School-kids, clutching the slatted sides -

Cocky ones waved hands in the air,

A farmyard fairground;

Swearing, screaming, shoving, laughing.

Allocated stints,

Measured out in turned over ground;

Cold umber mud

Unveiled its slumbering fruit.

Potato pickers,

We crawled the corrugated wake

Of slowly turning,

Silvery dissecting plough blades,

Our stiff, freezing knees

Painfully encountering stones.

Wet patches on jeans

From kneeling on rotten rejects,

Dirt under collar

Spattered by dried manure missiles.