Before The Harrowing

This is my most recent poem - I have a massive backlog of the things that I'll probably publish at some point but at quarter to 12 on a Sunday evening is not the time.

  

This poem formed when I was walking along the north Norfolk coast earlier this year. My family is from Norfolk and I love the landscape there. There's something special about it. A lot of the region is very flat and on the day I was walking along the coast the fields seemed to reach out to eternity - there was a definite feeling that I stood out as something vertical and I felt very very small. 

I was thinking of Sylvia Plath's poem "Wuthering Heights" when I wrote this. It's called "Before the Harrowing" because harrowing is something that's done to prepare agricultural land for the planting of crops and this obviously hadn't happened when I was walking along the cliff, because the fields were full of the remains of the crops from last year. They looked pretty sorry for themselves.

The picture is not actually the bit of coastline I was writing about, but it is a beach. In Norfolk.

Before The Harrowing

The weight of the low-slung, slow-hung clouds

Has flattened sea and land into thin flat bands.

Grey-brown, grey, brown, grey. 

Dead fields sown with dry sticks, I taste

The wind on salt-flecked lips,

And stand, and stand, between sea and land,

Feel it try to whittle me down.

Grey-brown, grey, brown,

Over and down,

To the cliff's ledge, water's edge,

All bound in narrow strips.

The shore shifts, sighs, slips,

And drowns.