Poem: Clearing the valley

When I was a child I spent my summer holidays with an elderly and much-loved aunt and uncle. It was they who introduced me to this valley. Sixty years on, the valley is busier and more densely populated, but the air is clearer, the stone cottages have been sand-blasted clean of a century of industrial soot, and the trees are coming back.

Some people say the trees are the wrong kind of trees, not native to the valley, and it's true that you’ll seldom see an oak or an ash, but you will find whitethorn, birch and alder, pioneer species perhaps, or maybe small enough to have escaped the axe, for it was the deciduous hardwoods that were hacked down to provide scaffolding for the construction of the railway; their absence is in itself part of the valley’s history.

Clearing the valley

the thorn trees

they let alone –

not that they were

superstitious,

only that the trees

cried out when cut,

and they couldn’t stand

to hear a woman curse

© Sheila Wild - Equinox