Summer, and the long grass is a snare drum.
The air hums with jets.
Down at the end of the meadow,
far from the radio's terrible news,
we cut the hay. All afternoon
its wave breaks before the tractor blade.
Over the hedge our neighbour travels his field
in a cloud of lime, drifting our land
with a chance gift of sweetness.
The child comes running through the killed flowers,
his hands a nest of quivering mouse,
its black eyes two sparks burning.
We know it will die and ought to finish it off.
It curls in agony big as itself
and the star goes out in its eye.
Summer in Europe, the field's hurt,
and the children kneel in long grass
staring at what we have crushed.
Before day's done the field lies bleeding,
the dusk garden inhabited by the saved, voles,
frogs, and nest of mice. The wrong that woke
from a rumour of pain won't heal,
and we can't face the newspapers.
All night I dream the children dance in grass
their bones brittle as mouse-ribs, the air
stammering with gunfire, my neighbour turned
stranger, wounding my land with stones.
The poem describes hay making in Wales, one summer in the early 1990s. The war in Bosnia was going on at the time. When a field mouse gets injured and dies as a result of the hay making, Clarke is reminded of the war and how the weak and vulnerable become victims of violence.
