County

 This isn't going to improve much for any more fiddling about. It is preferable if poems can arrive fully formed because the more one has to 'work' on them the more they look 'worked on' and possibly lose some of their immediacy so it's best to wait until they feel nearly ready before putting biro to the back of old envelope. Which is not to say one doesn't end up with something more than one thought one had, hopefully for the better.

What I did have to do was mangle it round to introduce one more full stop. While I've developed this way of extending sentences with any number of conjunctions, which sounds to me like some ongoing, inclusive grammatical trope, it can't be allowed to go on for too long. A full stop once in a while slows it down and is at least one amendment worth making.

But whereas in olden days there was not much else to do with such things than send them to a print magazine in the hope of a sympathetic hearing, that all seems a bit of a drag these days.

It is a generic English county of the type seen out of train windows and I hope to be able to see the same old ones again sometime later this year. But I imagine the village as an 'objective correlative' of the condition of retirement such as I've found it.

County

A village from The Domesday Book

that gave its name to a rare breed

of cattle that you don’t see now 

lies among fields that stretch towards 

undemanding horizon hills. 

It has no postcards of itself 

like places not too far away 

and has retired from what it used 

to do. In those days farmhands drank 

the local brew they made there from 

orchard fruit or crops harvested 

from the land they harried and carved 

themselves out of. 

                              The time of day 

or time of year bother it less 

than they matter to express trains 

that glide across the shiny tracks 

towards the medium-sized town 

with a mid-table football club 

and salespeople on telephones 

whose job it is to export things. 

But leisure comes to those who wait, 

whether they wanted it or not, 

filling a gap where there’d be none 

if there were nothing filling it.