Poet's note: Fire on Blackstone Edge

The traffic on the road outside my house is at a standstill and in both directions. Something is wrong, but I don't know what. 

All around me the hills are parched and brown, a dry, scorched ochre. Drought coloured. Tinder coloured. As I cross the field that leads to the towpath I can see smoke. The moors below Blackstone Edge are on fire and Halifax Road has been closed, hence the traffic.  A helicopter whirrs slowly and loudly towards the source of the smoke. Crows and jackdaws fly up in small, explosive groups, lucky to be flying free of danger. 

The air is humid. I can feel my hair frizz. Drought and humidity, not a comfortable combination. On the canal, all is calm, the fire hidden from view by the slope of the hill. A large flock of Canada Geese paddle slowly by. Swallows swoop low over the water.  The heatwave has produced a surfeit of flies; There are so many buzzing around in my living room that I have bought some carniverous plants, a venus flytrap and a pitcher plant, but I don't think they will rid me of the flies, for the plants are very small and the flies are very large. A swallow would have been a better bet.

Poem - Blackbirds

3 a.m. I watch the sun rise over Blackstone Edge. A full moon emerges from a bank of cloud. The moon and the sun seen in the same arc of sky - I should get up more often at this very early hour!

5 a.m. there's a faint mist, a blurring of the sight. The mist calms the jackdaws; their calls drop from frantic to conversational. A blackbird is singing most beautifully. Another answers him. Somewhere there is a thrill of blue tits.

By 6 a.m. the birds are silent. Are they, like me, going back to sleep?

Blackbirds

a merl of blackbirds strikes up,

if not virtuosi,

then choice performers,

their coda a scattering

of apple blossom

on a well-kept lawn

© Sheila Wild

Poet's note: The first swallow

The first swallow, so thin and tired that at first glance I'm not sure if it is a swallow, but then comes that unmistakable twist of wings at speed, and a bubble of happiness bursts inside me. 

The house near Gorsey Hill Wood

My house stands above a busy road, but my writing desk looks across to Gorsey Hill Wood, where there's a heronry. At the foot of the hill is a large Victorian mansion, ornately gabled, which hosts a roost for pipistrelle bats. My own much newer and more modest home is a maternity roost, where bats come to give birth to and nurse their infants. Once I found a baby bat in my front porch; it had fallen from the gable end, and was seeking shadow.

The copse of sycamore on the north side of my drive is home to a tawny owl, and in winter the ivy that clambers up the trees is browsed by red deer. At the end of my small back garden is a water meadow rich in wild flowers, a soakaway field for the infant river Roch. Beyond the river is the Rochdale canal, and beyond the canal, a broad stretch of rough pasture leads steeply up to the millstone grit outcrop of Blackstone Edge. 

Not a wild landscape, but a landscape that offers much. It's full of interest: air that's never still, light that changes with the hour and with the season, trees, meadows full of buttercups, and a host of small creatures, asking of me only that I notice them going about their daily business.