Black Lane Ends
A work in progress as part of the MA Dissertation
To frost and touch
the scratching grey
above scrawled trees.
Banking high, cloud
scoured and flat,
shadowless dawn
breaks
at a sociable hour.
Blackgrey sludge
of last year’s leaves, ground
beneath reluctant tyre,
low sun finds
the bits you’ve missed.
I was born in January. We lived on a small-holding (though we always refer to it as The Farm) at the time. Each winter, we were cut off from the main road by snow and kept two large freezers stocked for winter drifts. We kept goats and turkeys for cash, with a small flock of heritage breed sheep. An act of roleplay. We left before I was two.
As they stitched,
sutured,
my mother,
post-birth
post
me,
they asked;
‘are you doing anything
for Burns Night?’
‘Tonight?
Probably just
this.’
Born in January meant lambs soon followed. I wasn’t born in a barn, but I spent those early months swaddled in hay, nestled in bales whilst my parents lambed. Pulling still or wriggling sacks from screaming ewes. They were self-taught, my parents, not the lambs. Book-learned. One lamb arrived blue and unmoving. Fluid filled its lungs. Remembering a downturned page in one of their husbandry books, my dad took the lamb by its elastic hind legs and made to swing it around his head. The centrifugal force was meant to eject the fluid from the airways. He completed a quarter of a circle, an arc, before braining the lamb against a low beam he’d forgotten. The lamb was killed instantly. Its oxygen-deprived brain open to the air at last and staining the roof truss.
This is one of the few stories rolled out whenever The Farm comes up in recollection. Ziggy the pet goat, butchered and parcelled, when my sister was five. The rows of turkeys hung from the low beams of the kitchen, each row a different stage toward the Christmas bounty; bled, plucked, trimmed. The enormous, unkillable turkey, bloated on the wrong feed mix, left to live on that high, moorland sketch of stone and grass