Home

Whenever we think of home we come to this
the handful of birds and plants we know by name
John Burnside


Home

This small space in which I live my days
This square or two of Ordnance Survey map
My house a tiny rectangle beside the road
The boundary of my garden a dark line.

This place where I sleep and wake,
Eat my breakfast as the sun creeps over the hill
While small birds visit my garden; sparrows,
Dunnocks, starlings, blackbirds,
And sometimes a pair of goldfinches.

My feet in slippers tread the same familiar path
Across the floorboards, my feet in wellies
Step by step up the lane and through
The mud and puddles, and sometimes
Fast-flowing stream of the path
That leads to the Moor.

This Moor I know like the rooms of my house,
The backs of my hands, this Moor
In its seasons; growth of heather,
Bilberry, bracken, moss and bramble,
New shoots, flowers, berries, then the
Colours changing with autumn's decay,
The ginger grasses vivid in the rain.

And where the water flows when it rains
Too much, and where it sits, the path that
Skirts the biggest puddle by the broken gate,
The sheep that watch me from their field,
The wind at my back on stormy days
Threatening to push me over.