Time, Butcher’s Van, that I began
To hymn you panegyrically!
When at your wheels the gravel pinged
And tingled, no van, were it winged,
Could have arrived more lyrically!
We marked the man vacate you, Van,
To hob and nob satirically
With maid and cook, produce the book
To sign as proof, empirically,
Of how he’d made the drop
Of chuck and blade and chop.
And so
Goodbye to the shrilling of children,
The honking of jovial women admirers;
The pungent trays are re-racked
In the back of the motor. Down
The mossy-banked drive, the butcher’s
Away in the butcher’s van, and swinging
On to the well-sprung lane,
As he lengthens his stride with a pinch
Of judicious acceleration.
Hedgerows go singing by, entwined
With travellers’ joy and starred with stitchwort.
The Pilgrims’ Way
Unreels before him, the bucking Downs
Are ramping him up and dipping him under,
The butcher barrels along
In the racketing butcher’s van; the sun
Watches his progress with interest
Like a headmaster. The birds
Explete in the thorn trees at his advent;
Far away,
You can hear the tipper lorries
Double-declutch in painful tilting
At Westerham Hill. And here the jaunty,
Jouncing wagon is down from the ridge
And slowing, slowing into the verge.
The van is at rest like a sleeping
Dog on its heartbeat. The butcher
Opens the rear doors to the wind
And a blood breath climbs the sky.
In the copse by the chalk-stream pool
He strips and enters the grassy water,
The sunlit skeins of freezing water:
Over he rolls, he plunges under:
He swings on his back like a side of beef
On a hook, and all his sins
Are washed away…
