A famous battle happened in this valley.
                    You never understood the nature poem.
Till now. Till this moment—if these statements
                    seem separate, unrelated, follow this

silence to its edge and you will hear
                    the history of air: the crispness of a fern
or the upward cut and turn around of
                    a fieldfare or thrush written on it.

The other history is silent: The estuary
                    is over there. The issue was decided here:
Two kings prepared to give no quarter.
                    Then one king and one dead tradition.

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds
                    wait for language, for a different truth:
When you see the silk of the willow
                    and the wider edge of the river turn

and grow dark and then darker, then
                    you will know that the nature poem
is not the action nor its end: it is
                    this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,
                    on the steering wheel shaft: it is
an aftermath, an overlay and even in
                    its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with
                    sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen
And as I write valley straw, metal
                    blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.

Silence spreads slowly from these words
                    to those ilex trees half in, half out
of shadows falling on the shallow ford
                    of the south bank beside Yellow Island

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion
                    begins to be complete: what we see
is what the poem says:
                    evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and whin bushes and a change of weather
                    about to change them all: what we see is how
the place and the torment of the place are
                    for this moment free of one another.

From Volume 179, Number 2, November 2001

 Copyright © The Poetry Foundation