The bleached white road rises to the Saxon graves

and on to Northbourne, as it has for centuries.
Summer is perpetual on this June morning.
In the verge, azure pincushions of scabious poise
on slender stems, leaves moving with a gentle breeze.
Honey bees are hovering over purple knapweed,
while at the field’s edge where stinking mayweed wrestles
with the wheat’s sweet smell, sparrows bathe in silky dust.
Above the slope to Updown in the blueboard sky
a silent plane chalks up a line, and the larks sing.

Dead light blanks out time of day in dull October.
The tired dun soil, ploughed, harrowed, stretches out to rest
hoping it won’t be sown until spring comes once more.
Broken flints and lumps of chalk lie here, roughly strewn,
piebald reminders of the earth’s incontinence.
At the view’s edge, Betteshanger woods now turn to rust
following the storms and wild gusts of September.
The oaks look soft to stroke. Who threw those rufous pelts
over them so carelessly? They can’t bring shelter
from the coming weather.

A winter afternoon so cold it holds its breath
in air well laden with the sharp pure smell of snow.
No pigeons graze among the winter oil seed rape,
which lies disguised beneath a cloak of blazing white.
No-one sees the string of decorations twinkling
in snowy caverns roofed by drifts along the bank.
No rooks caw from the oaks beside Judd’s Cottages.
Only a skein of geese stitches its way neatly
through the sky to Hacklinge Marsh, as the falling sun
lights its evening fire from the logs of stratus clouds.