her day's obsession

Here's a poem taken from Mary Thomson's 2023 collection, as pictured, which I was lucky enough to receive as one of my Christmas-presents:


Sea Meadow

After heavy summer rain
tall meadow grasses
lie in troughs and break into crests,
like a painting of a stormy sea
by Joan Eardley.

She painted on the shore
wind buffeting her boards
sand blowing into the paint
she dragged in swathes
dripped and scumbled,
re-making the sea into a rant
against the tide that takes.

When a rank field under a yellow sky
was her day's obsession,
seeds and stems drifted into the oils
which under her brush
made the wild tangle and rear up
from hot complicated earth like a wall
on which she wrote its story.

After the rain a breeze
ripples the sea-meadow,
the grasses wave,
beckoning the end of summer
and the man who comes to scythe.

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Mary Thomson (1943 - )

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