Poem of the month: "Lapwings" by Alison Brackenbury

18 April 2013

Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet.

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales

Lapwings

They were everywhere. No. Just God or smoke
is that. They were the backdrop to the road,

my parents' home, the heavy winter fields
from which they flashed and kindled and uprode

the air in dozens. I ignored them all.
'What are they?' 'Oh - peewits - ' Then a hare flowed,

bounded the furrows. Marriage. Child. I roamed
round other farms. I only knew them gone

when, out of a sad winter, one returned.
I heard the high mocked cry 'Pee - wit', so long

cut dead. I watched it buckle from vast air
to lure hawks from its chicks. That time had gone.

Gravely, the parents bobbed their strip of stubble.
How had I let this green and purple pass?

Fringed, plumed heads (full name, the crested plover)
fluttered. So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass.

Then their one child, their anxious care, came running,
squeaked along each furrow, dauntless, daft.

Did I once know the story of their lives,
do they migrate from Spain? or coasts' cold run?

And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.
When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

With all the brilliance of their black and white
As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.

Alison Brackenbury tells us about the inspirations for her poems

Your poem draws on a background in the countryside. Tell us more.

Until I was 18 I lived in remote houses in the Lincolnshire countryside.

My father's family included at least five generations of shepherds. He began work as a ploughboy.

"Spanker, Sharper, Prince and Bob/ were horses that my father drove" is a line from my poem about my father 'At Eighty'. My father was extremely knowledgeable about farming, gardening, and its tools: 'palm-polished handles, Victorian elm'.

My grandfather would get up early on summer mornings, to watch badger cubs playing on the hillside, as he walked up to the sheep.

Fred Brackenbury with Limestone Romney stud rams, 1969. Copyright Alson Brackenbury

As a child, I learnt from my father about huge changes in farming.

Mechanisation and the use of agro-chemicals transformed the countryside after the second world war. The fields of cowslips he remembered had gone. Hedges were ripped up to create huge fields. The field next to our Lincolnshire home was nicknamed The Prairie.

I have long suspected, partly from gossip on farms, that agricultural pesticides affected bees.

Now you describe yourself as a "town bird". So you write about natural things in the town as well?

Yes, "Then" includes a tribute to the starling in our roof. Another poem celebrates the blackbird who sang at the door of our town workshop.

My garden poems feature bumble bees: "Huge white- and buff-tailed trundle by". Unbelievably loud, our resident cricket makes a guest appearance, like "a tiny tank''.

"Flood", is set in our small Gloucestershire town during the downpours of 2007. We had no mains water for 8 days, when "people fought in queues across the town".

This sobering experience convinced many local people that the climate had turned against us.

You work in a family metal-finishing business and have said engineers are underrated. Why?

The best of British engineering is world-class. Its skills should be put to the service of alternative technologies, with long-term financial backing by the Government.

I saw detailed proposals for windpower back in the 1970s, when I worked in a local technical college. It almost makes you despair; but I think despair is a luxury we cannot afford.

"Lapwings" © Alison Brackenbury 2013. From "Then", published by Carcanet Press in paperback and ebook formats on 25 April 2013.

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