A Winnowing
18 July 2020
The way it started, after hours,
seemed like subterfuge, the supper
only just cleared away,
and through the window the rude screech
and roar of monstrous machinery,
the clatter of blades, circling, greedy,
​​
eerily efficient, slashing through swathes
of summer grass. The haste of it, parcelled up
in the morning, spewed out by the bailer.
​
Evening brought silence, our shadows
lengthening ghosts that stretched across
the newly tonsured field where grass
once gusted by wind into sinuous waves,
camouflage for a ménage à trois
of pheasants, appearing, disappearing –
two hens and a cock, lording it over
everything they could see through
shifting curtains of green.
Now funereal crows peck at chaff, while
laughing children, no longer required
to bring in the harvest, chase butterflies.