Scrape on the river bed
Raise the rocks like you raise the dead
Pick the ground with the axe find the hole
Take out its claws
Clip Devils toenails, shells and barnacles
Imbue with life ammonites and Brachiopods
Bring them back out of the dark
Lying there mud-bound for millennia quite happily
Read the lie of the land
This slope that dip
Roll up the rocks lift
With your hand
Dig up the turf,
Throw it down
Bore into the bank like a thief for the sand
Use the spade to cut out cubes of stringy
Rooty sodden peat, that is so water logged
You can hardly lift it
Precious, so precious this harboured flesh
Like a surgeon cutting out the Fat of the Land
It takes grit, it takes belief to make a path
A determination to reclaim that little piece of wild
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