November poppies

I checked on the wild flower beds in Woking park for the last time today, expecting that gardeners would have raked over them as workmen were erecting fairground rides for the annual firework display on Saturday.

But no, while the mass was brown and dead, a few diehards survived. I started a poem on the First World War, but it's nowhere near finished so I'm going to run with one written over a year ago.

Before coming down south we lived near Huddersfield in a beautiful 300-year-old stone roofed cottage with oak beams - the lot. We had it far too soon.I never thought of us as owners - more as caretakers, looking after it for a while. One of its finest features was a path of York stone, weathered over all those years and running to the front door across a lawn enclosed by a stone wall.

One day, a few years after we had moved on, some workmen came to the house with their truck and removed the path and the stone copings on the wall. They were thieves and took it all in broad daylight. There's a market for this kind of stuff, sold on to yards specialising in "architectural salvage". The theft upset me, even though we no longer lived there, because the path belonged to the house. It was part of its history. So I wrote this:

Theft of a garden path


Splash puddles formed in
Hollows worn by centuries of
Foot scrape. The postman's
Boots, a soldier home
On leave, trench mud,
Powdered, dusting the
Wiped coconut matting,
Before the telegram,
And the bearer's
Funeral face, lace
Curtains hiding grief,
Etched episodes of
News, hope, sadness,
Love and celebration in
Layered fermentation.

Smooth surfaced,
Lawn-edged slabs,
Mason's serrations,
Chiseled through
Sedimentary time, fine
Sea-washed,
Carboniferous bed,
Kilned in the oven earth,
Abandoned in an
Unrecorded time,
Ignored in the chaos of
Man's irrelevance.

Quarried, shaped, settled,
Respected and admired,
Even, envied in their evenness
Envied, coveted, wanted and
Removed, reclaimed in a
Builder's morning, all
Shovels, picks and hard hats,
Whistling, donkey-jacket
Innocence, concealing
Base intentions,
Hauled to another place, face
Flaked, grimed,
Forgotten stories stripped in
Mute acceptance,
Cold, silent, unremarked,
Prisoned indifference and
Careless of ages.