Edge Hill

This is one of the poems I entered in the Warwickshire Young Poet Laureate Competition, and performed in the final - for the competition one poem was required to be about libraries, one about Warwickshire and one of your choice. This was my Warwickshire poem. It is about the site of the Battle of Edge Hill - a place where I often go looking for fungi. There is a local myth that the battle replays in the sky with ghostly figures on its anniversary. For more about the battle click here .

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Edge Hill

There are dead men’s fingers, weeping conks

and death caps if you know where to look,

brittlegills and candlesnuff

I search for those fruiting on the fallen limbs

of trees, who cradle in mycelium memories of skull

and rib, balls shot from muskets.

The battlefield is unassuming -

cows moan and sway, heave themselves up the scarp,

coats in matted clumps, they huff and grunt

rough themselves against bark

looking down over Warwickshire

its distant towns and huddled villages, patchworks of fields

punctuated by coppice and holt, legions of trees -

Itchington, Bowshot, Bawcutt’s

colours turning now, blushing fiery hues, russet

and bronze, Redlands Brake and Old Dyke Gorse,

Battleton, Graveground and Thorn

I search branches encrusted with wolf's milk,

chicken-of-the-woods - upturn them gently, inhale the

sweetness of mulch, the solace of decay.

On October the 23rd the battle re-plays

rages in the darkness, people gather, look skyward,

listen for the echoes of sword on sword, the night

crow-black but for the torches

of those retelling stories - Roundheads and King's Men.

Deceivers and polypores, burgundydrop bonnets,

bulgar and stinkhorns

turkey tails spilling from the rot-worn trunk of the Cromwell tree,

his name carved deep. I look for wood ears,

elf cups and witch's butter

walk ground still healing, the withered hawthorns 

bent in grief, curving themselves over invisible bodies,

mournful in history

there was no victory