Alan Peat

John Clare Coming Home from High Beech

In flat landscapes such as these, it is easy to follow the sun. We drift from horizon to horizon, through long lazy summers. Together. Unimpeded.

I am walking down Childerplay Lane; past the terraced rows of colliery houses; past the park and its boatless lake; past even the weavers’ cottages. I am walking back to a time before tarmac, when punt guns boomed across the fens and birds dropped dead in industrial numbers; when unperturbed children barely looked up from circles they’d drawn in the dust. I can see their pockets, fat as caged chaffinches, stuffed with marbles of roughly made clay.

Sometimes I walk further still, to a time when the iron railway was nothing more than clusters of Lady’s Smock^*. And the lane where children played gathered its name.

midday—
the showers of morning
cobwebs lost

---

^*Lady’s Smock is another name for the wood anemone. The term was commonly used in Victorian England. It is less frequently heard now.

---

About the Author

Alan Peat is a UK-based poet and author. His work has featured in Frogpond, Mayfly, Heliosparrow, The Heron’s Nest, Presence, and Hedgerow, among others. He won a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun 2022, was runner-up in the 2021 British Haiku Society’s Ken and Norah Jones Haibun Award, and was joint third-place winner in the 2022 Time Haiku ekphrastic haibun contest.

---