Fratres (Taking You With Me) Poem by Jen Hadfield

I paint the low hill until I admit
to how the light is on it.
Morning's coldest - working in thermals
and fleeces and socks in triplicate -
a lugworm, bundled bait
for the sky with the thunder-grey roe.

How is the light on the low hill now?
Blood through skin.
Once or twice a day sun opens the vein and
white is white of seagulls - sour Messiahs!
- then another two hundred
of Tommy's rainstained fleeces.

.

I said to Tommy (shifting stone)
whatcha doing and he said
playing at Nelson Mandela
what does it look like?

.

The layby's up for it, grips
your car, windows mossed with thin damp.
Headlamps chuck out sticky webs to slide
from the windscreen and your black/bright forehead.
Headlamps - grasses giant
and shrinking - and us knotted in the hill's hair.

Now you turn the key and the gate's sudden
red iron - the last moment we've netted.
You've picked a soundtrack, you want
to say to keep it light, don't get attached
('no angel') and I want to shock you agreeing
yeh keep it light
and I can carry you a while. For a day or two
I'll have this cumulus bruise (your passing weather)
on my lower lip.

.

Up here it turns out it's less simple
a ewe's fleece
stained by the season of her last tup.