Issue 24: Jack Thacker
from I, Sheep
Do you remember your mother?
I am a mother whom others don’t remember
if remember means see in your mind’s eye-slit
but if my young ones tried to find my voice
in this field here all of us speaking at once
yes, they’d remember remember remember
I’d hear her remember remumher memumbe
What is beyond the farm?
That’s like asking me –
what’s beyond the cloister?
I wear my habit and go about my needlework
of grazing each field to its border.
Then we are moved.
Sometimes a car passes. Sometimes walkers
look in over the bounds of barbed wire and gap-toothed hedge
onto our inner life, totally unable
to comprehend it. And I can see why.
It is a hard life to understand.
What is grass?
There’s a god in the grass
and it tells us our purpose
which is to tear it all up, bit by bit.
All day we take our communion.
We inhabit a holy carpet.
There’s a voice in the trees
and a drone in the sky. To eat,
to sleep, to stand and try to die
is our purgatory. It’s easy enough
to say it: ‘weather’ is a verb.
We go along with rituals.
We entertain possibilities.
Dust rises. Fresh grass. We know
where we are going and will go
in our time – unless pushed.
We are held. We are patient.
The operation is tolerated.
Resistance is offered – otherwise
it would be obvious. We are
handled. We struggle. We dig in.
There is a thing we learn and
it comes to us naturally. Soon
we return freely to the green
of our eyes, of our minds
and lower our heads to it.
We understand how to suffer –
maggots, blindness, foot rot, worms,
loneliness, yes, and mastitis.
We are, despite it all, used
to it all and its violence.
The River’s Chambers
for Michael Malay
You may come to a river which is not on a map.
– Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Something you say
catches my sense
and takes me back.
~
I picture the Thames:
a wood-panelled room –
hushed tones at twilight,
red wax, parchment, dust.
The candle is snuffed
and the quill set down for the night.
~
This was the year the Teme dried up
and revealed to us its secret surfaces –
a sweep of shale, stone
laid out in the shape of a serpent.
A skin. The river’s skin.
~
An early train. A valley. The Avon.
The night water
is lifting its eye-mask
from the river.
~
Later. Beaulieu. Everything
whited out in a half heaven.
The pale bronze of baked ferns,
graze line of deer.
~
He calls. He’s finally bought the boat outright.
A map of the canal network shows him
he could take it all the way from Hackney to Avon
then drive it to the farm up the Severn.
But London pulls him to her urban gut.
~
At a roundtable on water I learn
how the chemical properties of
freshwater and saltwater differ,
how saltwater is infinitely more complex than fresh.
But not all rivers end.
~
You go on
to show us
how the hearts
of elvers
are visible
through skin.
~
His ‘normal pills’, he calls them.
The trouble is, he can’t bear life
on the water when he’s on them.
~
The river sits down after the flood.
It hangs around like mercury.
It’s the light that moves, when the stream is still.
~
Sluices. Weirs. Dams.
The rivers’ gatekeepers
have deposed the old gods.
Deposed, but not forgotten.
The Lunar Bow
The farm’s what I’ll close with. Take this: a feed ring,
cattle with their heads in, eating, standing in a perfect
circle – are they the great minds of cow-kind in meeting
or are they the spokes of a lonely wheel? In fact,
they remind me of me reading in a library carrel
alone and not alone, which in turn reminds me of this:
gathering them all into that high-beamed corral
and forcing each one through the crush. Their stress
was ours, their lives our livelihood, their death. It works
the same with ewes, worming them in the yard: their sound
together panting in the heat was for us an earmark
of our lonely world, like clees on stony ground.
One night, during lambing, I went to sleep in the hay
and woke up surrounded by a handful of munching ewes.
The moon was fringed with a bow, an ice-formed halo,
and O I felt at one there, unborn, ovine. It’s true.
Jack Thacker was born in 1989 and grew up on a farm in Herefordshire. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including PN Review, Stand, The Clearing, and on BBC Radio 4. In 2016, he won the Charles Causley International Poetry Competition for his poem ‘The Load’. He has been the poet in residence at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading and is currently the ArtfulScribe writer in residence at Lighthouse, Poole. His debut pamphlet is Handling (Two Rivers Press, 2018).
‘I, Sheep’ is a filmpoem made in collaboration with filmmakers Teresa Murjas and James Rattee and will be released in July 2020. More information
Copyright © 2020 by Jack Thacker, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
