Fiona Clark is an active member of Suffolk Poetry Society, who has only been writing poetry seriously ( and not so seriously!) very recently. Her poems are quite widely published in journals and magazines. She performs at Spoken Word events, and plans to publish an anthology in the near future.
The Lark Trap ( Wicken Fen)
In the grey morning, the drizzle falls,
fine as a muslin veil on the lodes and reed-beds
Windmills lift still arms to the windless sky.
Our skirts looped up, backs bending in rhythm,
we slice through the sedges, snapping their steel-sharp stems,
hands in heavy gloves, with a flick of our knife blades.
The stilt-men stalk through the haar,
legs stiff as pond-skaters,
setting the eel traps, every day the same.
The storm blows up at night.
I lie awake in the loft with the others,
listening to the thrashing of the mills,
rain falling to flood the brimming lodes.
Tomorrow the eel-traps will be full of coiling eels,
their sleek sides soon to be skinned alive for the pot,
red water running thin from the chopping boards.
Rain clears. A fragment of white moon is snagged
in the ragged clouds. Winds scour the skies to blue.
In the fields, the men have set the lark-traps, before first light,
cylinders with minute mirrors, which twirl at the pull of a string,
to flash like the flapping of little wings in the sunlight.
Too soon the larks come flying into the fine net-prisons,
small wings threshing against the meshes,
sharp silvery protests raised in desperation,
as the huge blue freedoms of the skies vanish forever.
Here am I, struggling, fluttering, wondering
when he will meet me again, where the willows thicken
on a bend in the stream. My eyes are on the flat horizon,
where the barges turn towards the river,
heavy with peat and bundles of sedges.
He left for the town, to distant spires, too far away to see,
‘I must go,’ he said, ‘Who can stay put in one place forever?’
He thought to buy books, discover a world
beyond digging for peat and the cutting of rushes,
mouldering in a damp cottage with a smoking fire,
endless water, falling from skies, or flooding beneath us.
My heart is a lark in the mesh of my being.
Fiona Clark