About…
The poem is about talking to an old friend whose husband was somewhat violent and left her and the
kids for Australia The Ladies walk is a path through the National Trust Land at nearby
Ashridge
the image there being of the Ladies walk .. presumably originally an old forest road
there is an enclosure where cows are kept in the centre and fairly large herds of deer
gather there to graze of lounge in the forest edge in the sunshine during summer
Book 301 is intended to be a collection of poems by Mike Burr for 2010 with no thematic precept.
Ladies walk
ash and lime and beech tree shine
feather of the forests piquant green
trill sliding airs or clandestine
and dark and deep and shadowed leap
the raiment dun of deer
the scent of unhurried sunrise
slipping through the green gauzed glade
suspended in its tranquil fuming air
know then that dust conforms to laws
and sloughed tears and bitter brine entwine
into the seas of melting far away
on whose bleaching shores southern bones do shine
but this is england my foreign mountain friends
slow and rolling like its people
a sullen history of violence, it sends
its turn and moil through the breaking ages
a widow white of Solomons seal and cautious
but no malice roots where the garden grows so lush
so her house became a kind of fertile island
and where decades invented people so she contravened
that "must conform to laws", i learn
we walk the ash ridge ladies walk and talk as friends
Sources…
The idea originated from a couple of lines in
Ozark Mountain Daredevils
LP "the car over the lake" the track "gypsy forest" has the words
"and the oak and the pine
and the sycamore shine"