Visiting grandmother on Sundays, we walked.
Walked round the farm with ginger pig – big boar;
over the humpback stone bridge crossing small stream
with sticklebacks wriggling in crystal water.
Bull, snorting in the walled square of trampled mud;
turkey, horrific alien from a strange
alternate world. We crossed and recrossed small stream
until it became river. And river, dark, deep,
slid its way cold, forbidding along the base
of the windowless wall of the local jail.
And river scurried in rush and tumble past
the hangman’s cottage; eddied and twirled on slabs
of smooth white stone where the gipsies washed their clothes.
River headed away under the trees, while
we took the turning to grandmother’s fruit cake.