Down the Heavens.

Hello Folks,

Here, I’d like to introduce to you my last pamphlet collection, Down the Heavens.

  It was published by Yew Tree Press the year before last and made, almost exclusively, from land around the corner from here known locally as The Heavens. This is a 102 acre area of disused fields, woodland, streams and brooks whose recorded history of human settlement stretches back from the late sixties to the Dubunni, our local tribe. The last grazing cows left in 2016 and it has been recovering ever since.

   This land has also been used by generations of locals for all its real worth, as a simply beautiful place to be. From the dog walking mornings and evenings to the stream damming, barbecue afternoons, to the teenage campfire parties it has been, and remains, a natural home from home for hundreds. But most importantly, it is home to an ever-diversifying ecology and, with the demise of agriculture, particularly grazing, the native woodland returns apace. Home to herself.

  As the years of dereliction passed in the hands of the landowners, the future of The Heavens remained uncertain. Until this year, when it was put up for sale. Now, our local community is buying all 102 acres together and making it safe for future generations by putting it into community ownership. And that is probably the best expression of reciprocity any group of people could give back to land that continues to give so much to so many.

  Down the Heavens is one such gift. If you’d like a copy for £5, get in touch directly or you can find it here . I’ll leave you with a poem about following a run of water that, on the maps at least, had no name, until…

   Well, what’s in a name? Not much.

   But, what’s in a naming? A listening, listening here.

Until next time. Go well.

The Course to Naming a Brook

Something like you begins here, as a spring, running

from a pipe, buried through a drystone, brimming

a half-circle cow-trough laid into the wall. Overspilt

in limestone silt, moss grown deep, haired with long grass,

you’re a last mammoth, leaning into an era’s end.

Or what I see when I listen to some cellular reverb plying atomic time.

Or random memory. Or a limestone trough, with this man stood in front,

hearing a quiet corner of the Dryhill field, under the Havens house.

The moss wrings itself out and you well in hoof-prints,

smoothing them down and begin your fall again. You let slip

under the elder hedge, hop down a half dozen faezy pools,

as wide as hands pushed into the bank. You are only water now,

a membrane wetting the boot-smooth, ragstone path,

before a switch back, down a sheep-drove track and disappearance

into your sound’s pooling. You go through the houses’ clearcut,

under elder nettle briar, the air full of flight, bees

on the bramble flower and a pair of cryptic wood whites,

who flit out and over the old man’s beard like eloping brides.

Meadow browns hang down on blood-green dock leaves until it stops.

The wood appears, the light drops and you reveal yourself,

a full twelve strides wide, as a roll-stone rattlebed of ovalled fists.

I wait on the edge of you, for time, in the ash scrub,

where each stem, ivy-clamped in varicose jackets, hangs

heavy with fallaway vine. I listen for your leak-trickle

through barbed wire, into sound in the next clearing.

The bramble push-over waves, crest astral,

blackberry milk-pink flowers, docking with the hive.

From under them, a bedrock surfaces, like a whale’s head,

its skull ridge heavy, stepped downhill in your song’s mirror.

Stream as sound, sound as briar wave, as stone sound,

your polyphony falling faster, louder now, plummeting

the lumpen shelves, like a hurried explanation and making

for the relief of the meadow’s slowing. I clamber into you here,

head for a home in your leaps, where the human path

crosses your stones, scattered and dam-strewn,

turned and turned again in re-arrangement.

From here, where the people start, I look back to your pipe’s dream,

pushing through the drystone, as some anonymous begin-again,

from early rains to slow returns. I’ll call you Havens Brook,

and keep to following your way home:

                 Havens to Lime to Frome to Severn,

                 home to begin again,

                 Havens to Lime to Frome.