In the spirit of the thread, I hope, and inspired by Fliss's latest, I will now go ahead and post a sheep poem that once graced these boards sometime around 2019. It's been edited lightly since. I'm not sure that I wear my heart on my sleeve in it, but I do describe my approach to schoolwork aged about eleven, in Thanet.
John
Better Grass
The sheep are in the meadow at attention.
Beneath a low cloud, rain comes glistening
from Heaven onto hedge and sheep and grass
like some slow punishment. The sheep do not
appear to notice or to care. A clump
of rain-wet sheep an archipelago
of those whove wandered off to where the grass
has spoken to them this is pretty much
how sheep appear to live. And yet, a lamb
bolts leggily across the grass as if
it danced on flowers and the sun were out,
and life were worth the living. Could it be
that we might see the sheep stir into life
like this young lamb that in the rain-swept field
there might be celebration? I do not
hold out much hope. And so, the heart constricts,
to see that lambs tomorrow all the days
it will not frisk or frolic, all the hours
in which the rain will win and with its fellows
it will graze on and endure. And when I think
of my time upside-down on the brown couch
translating Greek, of days when I was young,
I feel that rain upon my shoulders all
the weight of things and I am moved to bow
my head to graze, my eyes to better grass.
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