Two Poems by Clare Crossman Mandala by Stela Brix, 2018 The South Country On Chalk Barrow Hill the land rolls on remembering itself in down lands, copses and corridors of trees. The path lifts straight up to the distant sky. Below, a church spire marking habitation; an ornate and cobbled town. The land creaks, with archaeological depth of mound and barrow, chalk whiteness, taking all the eye. Willows frame a horizon of green mornings. I was a girl here, ran out of doors from a low brick house open to outbuildings and the air. Roads and lanes held no shadow. as if there was never any weather. Returning, the long grass is waist high and ditches full of rain. This leaded window opens on a view across the meadow. Broad paths are mown along barley fields. Voices rise from lived in, light filled houses, boats float reflected on the water, of all the long slow rivers. In the south country, there is an ease. One thing becomes another as the landscape blurs and falls towards the sea. String In the thin sun of a mild morning, The windows streaked with winter light I picked up the strong twine. Dropped from your pocket, too short for garden use. There’s something about string. How it leans with the wind, supporting foxgloves and runner beans from endless changes in weather. How it tightens its purpose to keep collected things neat, but yields to let what is enclosed slip. These rooms where we live together tied by a loose knot, that shifts and stays hours full of skeins that stop us falling down. About the Author: Clare Crossman’s pamphlet won the Redbeck competition in 1996. Since then she has published four collections of poetry, she is working on her fifth from Shoestring Press due to be published in summer 2020. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies most recently Letters to the Earth, Harper Collins. She also wrote for Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge on the Connections project. She has recently written poems about a local chalk stream for the film Waterlight wwwwaterlightproject.org. She lives in Cambridgeshire and sometimes in Cumbria. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading... Published by fragmentedvoices A small, independent press based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, and Prague, the Czech Republic View all posts by fragmentedvoices