Poem of the Month "Hedge-layers" by David Morley26 September 2013
Each month we feature the writing of a celebrated poet. Our September poet is David Morley.
Hedge-layers
Solitary persons are sideing up the hedges and thrusting the brushwood in the thin places and creeps which the swine made from one ground or field into another and stopping gaps made by gleaners and labourers
Sheep scuttle from pasture to pasture following their green god.
John and Wisdom go gapping-up: one man on the cattle-side,
one among barley; both friends shin-deep in sliding cherry mud.
Their billhooks snicker as they sned the stems and the stubs
weep sap. They have toiled since dawn. It is time for their bait.
"It is time for debate," shouts the Gypsy over the hazel hethering.
"We weave the pleachers later." John Clare kneels at the feet
of the hedgerow. He sheep-shoves through one of the breaks;
his body will not follow. Wisdom smiles and goes on speaking:
"The hedges of hawthorn yearn to become trees. They grow
with their young legs splayed. They sway with ripening buds.
A pleacher reaches for its root through its bark and sapwood
which is all in our cut and our angle and our taking of its toe.
Lie fallow there, poet, and you will grow young with the hedgerow."
Stanley Anderson "Hedgelayer"
David Morley explains the inspiration of his poem
Your book explores the friendship between the 19th-century poet John Clare and Wisdom Smith. Tell us about it.
Clare sought out Gypsies for stories, songs and tunes but also for the zest of their company. One character kept cropping up in Clare's notebooks: "Finished planting my ariculas—went a botanising after ferns and orchises...—got the tune of 'highland Mary' from Wisdom Smith a gipsey and pricked another sweet tune without name as he fiddled it."
What first caught your attention?
I am partly Romani, and am alert to anything Gypsy; Wisdom Smith leapt out at me and I started writing sonnets about his friendship with the poet. The poem is a story imagined into life from moments in the notebook.
The poem includes all kinds of specialist vocabulary. Where did you unearth those words?
When I was an ecologist in the Lake District I trained in dry stone walling and hedge-laying. Weaving the wands of a hedge is like weaving words into poetry. Poems and hedges are living things; they are hand-work, head-work and heart-work.
"Hedge-layers" appears in "The Gypsy and the Poet" by David Morley published by Carcanet, 2013.
Please help us to protect nature.
© Jemimah Kuhfeld
