The Barn

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Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory

Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks.

The musty dark hoarded an armoury

Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.

The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.

There were no windows, just two narrow shafts

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Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit

High in each gable. The one door meant no drafts

All summer when the zinc burned like an oven.

A scythe’s edge, a clean spade, a pitch-fork’s prongs:

Slowly bright objects formed when you went in.

Then you felt cobwebs clogging up your lungs

And scuttled fast into the sunlit yard –

And into nights when bats were on the wing

Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared

From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.

The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff

To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.

I lay face-down to shun the fear above.

The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.