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As a child I used to spend many of my holidays staying with my grandmother in Sark. There was a beautiful valley called Happy Valley near to my gran’s guest house. The valley had steep slides and ran down to a very dangerous, near vertical crumbly, cliff face which fell a couple hundred feet to a beach below.
The valley was used by clay pigeon shooters and my cousins, brother and I used to collect the unbroken clays and return them to supplement our pocket money. Once our bike baskets were full of clays we would often spend time playing on the wooded slope pretending to be woodsmen, building hides and traps and generally larking about.
This poem celebrates the time we spent building “Man traps” which in those days was one of my favourite games
The Woodsmen
Dappled green light,
bird song,
muffled voices.
Vine across path,
twisted upward
into branches.
Log hangs high.
Notched stick
bears weight.
Stick pokes vine
Log falls
Woodsmen laugh.
John Carré Buchanan
07 April 2012
Hi JB, funnily enough opened a bag I left here in Chad 4 years ago and it had a book on a 'year in Sark' so started to read it last night. So fu to find this poem...
ReplyDeletePrepositioned books Bryan, Logistics at its best! A year in Sark would be quite a break from the normal rat race - sounds idyllic. I hope you have a good stay there and I look forward to your safe return. Thanks for checking the blog.
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