Day 538 of the daily poems. Our poet Fiona Clark envisages a scene of meadows, cool waters and summer courtship in her poem ‘Not Flatford Mill’, which celebrates the beauty of the low-key, the ordinary, the not especially picturesque aspects of nature – and not especially dramatic aspects of love …
Not Flatford Mill
The Stour glides greenly, glassily
wrinkling to slow concentric circles
as small boats take people out to watch the bats,
hoping for an elusive barbastelle, perhaps.
A cloud of midges hovers, settles over
dusty, grey silk nettle-beds.
Willows and hazel cluster, silver-white
in a light breeze, at the turn of evening.
Not Flatford Mill, the river flows outwith
the framing of the famous scene,
Not Constable, an anonymous hand applies
soft brushstrokes, crosshatches grasses
in middle-distance meadows, shades
the grisaille of a ghostly heron’s flight,
highlights white hawthorn,
and the glimmer of a solitary swan,
dabs in the pale gleam of a crescent moon,
white as a fragment of house-martin’s egg,
lodged in the darkening sky.
On the grey-green riverbank, a pair of lovers,
barely discernible shapes in the shadows,
lie wrapped in each other’s arms,
lost in the milky way of cow parsley,
where lovers have always lain,
not Romeo and Juliet, quietly
unremarkable, as the cool waters glide by.
Fiona Clark