This poem appears in The Listening Walk along with three others. I wrote it some years ago when I was living a rather rural life in Norfolk.
rhythm
First time I see
Jimmy
I think he’s an angel
up on the back of a trailer,
hair like barley straw
evening sun coming low
through the trees
giving him a halo.
I squint up at him
from the barn floor
and him, he’s like a
pendulum
swinging his body from
side to side,
lifting the bales
one by one
one by one
pitching them down
to the men below.
This rhythm,
he says,
it gets a hold of you
and it stays.
Me, I think
I’d like a bit of that
rhythm too.
ways with words in the city of Wells 