August Lament : Strawberries in December
August nineteen forty three,
beneath a crystal canopy
of sweet sunshine warm air
they took me to the seaside.
We sat on a beach as clean
as my grandmother’s kitchen,
we paddled in rock pools
whose water was as clear
as the unpolluted night sky.
They carried me laughing,
shoulder high into the waves,
and I could see small crabs
dancing on a carpet of sand,
fine white gold and blue.
We climbed up the long hill
and sat on the world’s edge,
small fields below spread
across the landscape like
a soft lopsided patchwork,
ochre, ebony and poppy red
stitched unevenly together
with dull green hedge and
shimmering leafed tree.
Here linnets and turtle doves
sang, yellow hammers made
their nests on hedgerow banks
strewn with purple honesty,
white comfrey, pink motherwort.
From my high grassy perch
I could see diminutive
white ducks on the pond,
graceful in the rippling water;
two massive Suffolk mares
pulling the wooden plough,
their chestnut coats glowing
flames against the soil dark
first furrows of the year.
And there were butterflies,
Large Tortoiseshells orange
bright, the vivid Adonis Blue,
marbled High Brown Fritillaries
and dignified Dingy Skippers.
Some seventy years later
as the dull grey toxic cloud
rolls along the Gallic coast,
masking the sun, staining
sullen water and dismal sky,
I take myself to the seaside.
Spilled oil rimmed rock pools
have become graveyards
for cormorant and little tern;
the laced foam, once white,
is thick with yellow sludge
meandering across a slimy
floor of malignant polythene.
No crabs are dancing here.
Up to the top of the long hill
where, spread out before me,
a hundred acre field suffocates
beneath a ton of vicious glass.
I see no hedges, hear no birds
sing, no wildflowers turn
their sweet faces to the sun,
no butterflies flutter in this
hot dusty August afternoon.
Persistent Greed has connived
with reckless Progress to
lay waste to the simpler world
of my childhood, for all must now
have strawberries in December.
Naomi
