About…
The poem is dedicated to friends of the earth and the mores and fashions prevalent
among the chattering classes .
Katie Bookguilder is intended to be a collection of poems 60 poems expressly for the Book Guild
by Mike Burr - the themes being dictated by or about its published artisans .
Bryony hill
if i stood upon Bryony hill
what would i see
i see a distance a chicken crossing a road
why is that fluffy little chicken crossing that busy road ?
to get to the other side - No
just because it was there - No
the answer is that it had been an egg
it had been made as an egg the other side
of that hurly burly road
but there it is
flat as a furry omelette
about a third of the way across lane two
and from the wood edge of Bryony hill i can see the snaked canal
and her barge with wood, littered, untidy, on its side path
a thin stream of heat rising from its tiny boiler
the one i welded up :- its metal patch festered like a pustule
by her own admission she was
"a compost kind of a girl"
heaving black organics round the allotment
her long hair and mud wrapped around the roots of carrots
red and thin their rouged line quaking like the red coterie soldiers
in the face of battle because they know
she eats them !
and in the death of a few carrots and sundry runner beans
she sees herself
a small but literate saviour of the world
where providence in its jets
is luring poverty wrenched plots in say distant Ecuador
into the markets of the wealthy western world
not that the peasant labour gets his or her befit
but being
"a compost kind of girl"
she understands their labour
in a cosset-cushioned fluffy chicken kind of way
Sources…
Katie at the book guild sent me a list - presumably of poetry notabilia
The name Bryony hill appealed to my warped mind and i immediately wanted to
stand upon the crest of such a lovely sounding place - which i imagined to venture views
like the ones from the ridgeway at Uffington - i should point out that i do not
actually know bryony hill the person and therefore can in no way be about her but more
a generic type of friend of the earth ....
Picture of the real
Bryony hill