Proloog – üks väike luuletus allotmentist ehk datšast ehk renditavast aiamaast ehk vabast peenrast.
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John Maydew, or The Allotment
Ranges
of clinker heaps
go orange now:
through cooler air
an acrid drift
seeps upwards
from the valley mills;
the spoiled and staled
distances invade
these closer comities
of vegetable shade,
glass-houses, rows
and trellises of redly
flowering beans.
This
is a paradise
where you may smell
the cinders
of quotidian hell beneath you;
here grow
their green reprieves
for those
who labour, linger in
their watch-chained waistcoats
rolled-back sleeves –
the ineradicable
peasant in the dispossessed
and half-tamed Englishman.
By day, he makes
A burrow of necessity
from which
At eveneng, he emerges
here.
A thoughtful yet unthinking man,
John Maydew,
memory stagnates
if you and breeds
a bitterness; it grew
and rooted in your silence
from the day
you came
unwitting out of war
in all the pride
of ribbons and a scar
to forty years
of mean amends…
He squats
within his shadow
and a toad
that takes
into a slack and twitching jaw
the worms he proffers it,
looks up at him
through eyes that are
as dimly faithless
as the going years;
For, once returned
he found that he
must choose between
an England, profitlessly green
and this –
a seamed and lunar grey
where slag in lavafolds
unrolls beneath him.
The valley gazes up
through kindling eyes
as, unregarded at his back
its hollows deepen
with the black, extending shadows
and the sounds of day
explore its coming cavities,
the night`s
refreshed recesses.
Tomorrow
he must feed its will,
his interrupted pastoral
take heart into
those close
and gritty certainties that lie
a glowing ruse
all washed in hesitations now.
He eyes the toad
beating
in the assuagement
of his truce.
Charles Tomlinson, A Peopled Landscape, Oxford 1963
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