First the Sharpened Blade

First,
the sharpened blade
cuts fallow ground
to wounded smoothness.

Then,
we look in it for tomorrow
and among the crumbs of yesterday
search out roots as complicated as time passing,
as simple as water finding its own level.

Because,
we dig the dirt out of hunger
to dispel the taste of it with dumb-grained tilth
ripening on our tongues.

Only then
can we till the darkened earth and,
under hand and foot and plough-shaft,
stir the depths of death and rebirth
until decay’s last resting place is alive.

This,
the sinuous wisdom of our tending,
is a green labour in the fields where patience
hears seeds sigh before they burst,
their shoots creaking against the soil grains,
the whisper of light discovering chlorophyll
and wind, the least of it, breathing,
in the stomata of every leaf.

Then again,
growth follows like a dawn where daybreak
eases itself above everything, slow as mountains rising,
secret as their stone, flowing like the afterthought of rain
dripping in torrents, river to sea, ocean to cloud, to rain again,
in the falling night, where bare ground sings its microscopic song.

Now we must learn
how soil grows, stem and root, how it feeds itself,
how it buries its own dead between particles of earth,
how it feeds the living, while water, underground,
seeps through its veins and small mouths sip
from each cup of rain, the mysterious sustenance of time.

In the end,
the heft of our tools’ wood and metal turns to husbandry,
the tenderness through which land can speaks its language,
where its words are field and forest, grass and meadow,
and always in the writhing understory of briar and bramble,
the margins of wilderness along the roads of harvest,
the verge-lands where forgotten creatures slip a living,
and the highways where nature feeds our times of plenty
even when we believe we are masters of its fruit.

 BH, 2019

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Written and read at a celebratory dinner for Forres Feast, a consortium of local sustainable food producers in the Forres area of Moray. This was on 5th October 2019.

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