Poetry by Christie Dickason

Coming to Woodlands for the first time

Ears pricked forward, we lean
into the neat unrolling.
The gift of a story! The birth of Here.
Once upon a time...
He tells us what came next,
this man who has travelled
then ended
here, descended
in ordered generations
from the man who
(in the beginning) walked
forty miles to find his life
now sitting square
in his bronze boots, a worn bronze hat
above narrative plaques.
Once upon a time...(We’re
still keeping track.)
It seems to unfold in tidy order, then

we find
that we are circling
and doubling
like the hares in the fields, eyes busy, ears hungry
nose-down in a bean patch, in a hedge of may,
too much, too rich,
too many tales for travelling
a straight line.
We are lost among red cattle, wander
hip-deep in green, re-meet curving dykes,
try to read the punctuation
of sheep in sweeping paragraphs of fields,
find still one more
treasure-shed to enter,
and yet, no matter where we go -
among mysterious veiled lettuces or
looking into the startled
eyes of new-hatched turkey chicks -
in that great flat
encircling space
where his story arrived,
it feels always at the centre.