Harbingers
Christine
Ann Clatworthy
The
hay-barn was home to so many things –
resplendent
with spider-webs,
bedecked
with shrivelled remnants of dried
and
tattered wings, the twisted corpses
of
insects, long since dead,
ensnared
in tangled, tensile threads
piles
of crumpled newspapers,
ochre,
crisp, curled with age,
stacked
on some long-redundant mattress,
springs
exposed, horse-hair and wadding
chewed
into scraps
by
marauding field-mice and rats.
Rickety
stacks of half-empty paint-cans,
stashed
on wormy, wooden boxes
that
once stored the Coxes
from
an orchard long-gone.
The
smell of times-past and the ghost
of
children's laughter, hang from musty rafters
where
the swallows still dive
through
a gash in the roof,
lashed
by some wild, winter storm
to
find their old nest, as yet safely cradled
by
the ancient, oak-beams
newly
lined for this year’s brood.
Such
a cruel irony,
that
in a few short months
the
barn will be laid to dust
and
in the field on which it stood,
where
long-eared barley grew so tall,
next
year’s crop will be sewn ...
of
red-bricked, terraced houses
with
their terracotta, tiled rooves
all
in regimented rows.
But
the hay-barn, topped with thatch
and
its mud-crafted cone
where
the young swallows hatched,
will
be gone.
***
Christine
Ann Clatworthy lives and works from a small bungalow in the
heart of the English countryside. Her life-long love of poetry
is driven by her passion for her environment, her family, a black
and white cat called Chess and the whole of this crazy, wondrous
thing we call ‘life’.
©
Christine Ann Clatworthy