Voices that be gone

 Voices that be gone

(after William Barnes)

 

One robin atop red-berried hawthorn

sings farewell to late summer

 

each time I go out into the garden.

Save for him the place is dumb

 

summer birds silent now

no blackbirds or sparrow chatter, no finches or wren.

 

Sometimes a magpie cackles

or a passing gull calls from a distance

 

a skein of geese hoots

through the valley on their way to somewhere else

 

a straggling swallow turns and dives

before it flicks away on the next rise. 

 

A jet fighter sears the air

filling all our space with its roar.

 

We are all silenced. Even the robin.

 

*Lincocut image by Karen Little @kazvina. First published with my poem 'Sparrows' in the anthology 'How Quickly it all Passes', 2024

'Silence' of the countryside

right here, today

House martins chat and twitter as they fly; bees are buzzing, and flies too. The roar of a distant plane reaches down from 30,000 feet;  a finch calls, sparrows chatter on; swallows squeal as they swoop and dip; a cow lows, a while later a horse neighs. A milk tanker passes in the lane and a tractor follows with a farrow rattling behind.

A buzzard calls and somewhere goldfinches chatter out of sight; a crow caws and a seagull cries. Later, a  blackbird is startled and shouts a warning.

All these are transient sounds, coming and going all the day, that we notice only if we sit and listen for them. I spent more than an hour to list those above.

But what is that? That all-pervading, nerve breaking persistent insistent noise? It is the drone. It is Watchkeeper, the MoD’s unmanned aerial vehicle, which is being tested day and night over our countryside.

The level of the noise is enough to invade your consciousness. It is louder than the distant plane, the seagull and the milk tanker, than all those sounds.

watchkeeper

And once it has you, you cannot shake it off. It goes round and round with its constant hum. The drone, the sound of our summer. And the soundtrack for the many who come on holiday here to our beautiful once-quiet countryside of west Wales.