The poems in Behind the Idyll (Mary Thomson Books), shortlisted for this year’s Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for Poetry Pamphlets, are by the publisher herself and illustrate eloquently the realities of farming behind sentimental pastoral visions.
FARM YARD
It was both prison and play pen
walled with sandstone cowsheds
floored with river cobbles
dusty and littered in summer with hay
in winter veined with ice and snow that
turned to a sludge of mud.
~
I idled and day-dreamed there with skipping rope and ball,
swoop of swallows, chatter of sparrow, dog asleep in the sun;
peered down at night to learn the secrets of bats and owls.
~
Every day I returned to it with my satchel of books
to the smells of manure and warm milk
the steady suck and throb of milking machines
punctuated by a tail swish, a neck chain chink,
home inexorably to that inexorable twice-daily event.
No wonder I dreamed of escape.
THE ROAN COW
Our herd had numbers not names,
but I talked to the russet roan
who stood quietly for milking
near the yard end door of the cow shed.
~
She was daintier
than the Friesians with their big feet
that might have had Dutch clogs on
they clattered so
on the cobbles of the yard.
~
My neat roan was not big-eyed
Like the one Jersey we kept for her cream
nor skittish
like the awkward Ayrshires.
~
Only I knew her name
the day she was shoved,
mucky-rumped,
up the ramp of the slaughter house lorry.
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