Day 693 of the Daily Poems – our poet Jane Monach blends text ‘At the Dacha’ by the late Helen Dunmore with lines from her own piece ‘On the Bole Hills’
At the Dacha / On the Bole Hills
It is beautiful here.
It is a glorious place of wide skies, green slopes.
Lots of people wouldn’t think it was.
Dog walkers abound, two minutes from busy pavements.
But when you’ve hunted mushrooms in the woods year after year
But if you’ve seen the willow herb amongst tall grasses,
and you know all the best places,
and you know where tortoiseshells flourish;
when you’ve fished every pool and stream and know
when you’ve trodden the narrow paths through trees and see
where the trout hide on the stony bed while water ripples over their back;
where nettles and mist of purple Yorkshire Fog wave at each other;
when you’re covered with scratches from foraging for berries;
when your hands have rippled the seeds of sedge and cocksfoot;
when you come home, dusty, sweaty and triumphant with a load of firewood;
when you arrive home breathless with a perfect black-and-white
magpie feather;
when the marshes have sucked at your boots as you’ve jumped from tuft to tuft;
when the paths have led you up and down and leaves have stuck to
your shoes;
then you love it with all your heart.
then this is where you are glad to be.
You want it to live for ever.
You want it outside your window always.
Your own death doesn’t seem to matter as much.
Your own death a small thing.
Jane Monach
A prose passage from Helen Dunmore’s novel The Betrayal, line-ended and intertwined with a piece about the hills I live on – 26 June 2020