Morning sun

Cut grass. Pull weeds. The first potatoes up. Hoopoes and cuckoos calling. The first swifts, way up, a whole gang of them, moving north sideways. I whistled them my high pitched through-the-teeth ‘swift whistle’. They could care less. Clearly not *our* swifts but swifts of passage.

The spring running fit to burst after the recent rain. First poppies. First broad beans. Ragged robin. The ordinary and the yellow-flowered cleaver swarming. The grasses thick, abundant, rushing now to flower and seed. The mower catching again and again in the persistent fox’s pockmarked terrace. A huge toad tucked in beneath the damp sward safe from the cutter’s pass. The scaly tail end of a snake disappearing by the walnut tree.