The hay-barn could tell many a story;
resplendent with spider-webs, bedecked
with shrivelled remnants of dried
and tattered wings; twisted corpses
of insects, long-since dead, ensnared
in tangled, tensile threads.. Crumpled
magazines – newsprint, ochre, crisp –
curled with age, stacked on some
long-redundant mattress, springs exposed,
horsehair and wadding chewed into scraps
by marauding field-mice and rats. Rickety stacks of rusted paint-cans;
Victorian Red, set solid as cement,
stashed on worm-riddled boxes
that once stored the Coxes and rosy
James Grieves from an orchard,
since many years – gone to seed.
The smell of times-past – the ghost
of children’ s laughter, hung up to dry
from gnarled and twisted rafters, where
swallows dive through a hole in the roof,
lashed by a wild, December storm.. their cone-shaped nest, safely cradled
by ancient oak beams, ready-lined
for next year’ s brood. Cruel irony then,
come the spring, all of this will be gone,
and in the field where once it stood..
where bearded barley grew, so tall,
a ‘ cash-crop’ will have been sown..
‘ affordable’ houses, in neat little rows.
Laid to dust, the barn, with its Norfolk
thatch roof, the swallows called ‘ home’ .