By Before the marsh on the coastal plain was drained –
to turn the dark, rich glacial soil
into the broad fields of market gardens,
selling fresh produce south to the port city
burgeoning daily from mouth to mouth –
the mere was vast, eight square miles and more.
Family groups wandered the margins –
to fish, collect eggs, snare birds. Settlements
became hamlets, became villages:
cutting the reeds for thatching, cutting the peat
for cooking fires from the ice age bogland.
***
The long orangey-pink streaks of sun setting
over the Irish Sea turn the lake
from silver to pewter, and the birds
to cut-outs. A two carriage commuter train
crosses at the furthest edge, its windows
rectangles of bright yellow in the twilight –
as the watchers in the hides observe,
in a barely whispered wonderment,
thousands of pink-footed geese appear.
They are wintering here from the breeding grounds
in the mountains of Iceland and Greenland –
by day feeding on stubble fields, in the dusk
settling noisily on these dark waters
with their poignant, slightly throaty calls,
their myriad wings black in the fading light.
boglandGreenlandice ageIcelandIrish seaMartin Mere Wetlandpeatpink-footed geese
Ashen Venema
December 28, 2019Fading light, like no other, expands beauty by calling in the past. Lusciously evocative. Loved being there with the poet.
Clive Watkins
January 1, 2020What the first section of your poem brought to mind is this, not really a literary response, David, but a kind of “Yes, and…”. In 2005, we spent October and part of November in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. At the time, one of our children and his wife were doctors in the hospital there. What struck us very forcibly was the way the land was capable of sustaining the city’s population of about a hundred and fifty thousand only with massive and continuous subsidies from other parts of the country. Water, for instance, was piped in from a long way off. The European-style lawns that surrounded the best houses and the reservations on the highways in the city were watered at night, and without this regime they would have died. European efforts to make the territory more productive included raising water buffalo (not native: running free, they destroy the watercourses) and growing mangoes and grapes. Tourism and a large military base were important economic functions. Darwin is extremely remote from other centres: everything has to be brought in. These are only examples. It seemed to us the case that the only lifestyle the land was naturally capable of sustaining was one where human populations per acre were very low – the lifestyle of the Aborigines perhaps. We have misused our planet horribly. I sit here at my desk in my small Yorkshire village and write you this on my iMac.