Poetry by Clare Best

Planting for the future needs vision, seeing a long way ahead, dreaming the unlikely or even what seems impossible, imagining apple trees bearing fruit when you're planting bare sticks in the hard winter ground.

I'm only at Woodlands every few weeks, but I think and write about the place all the time when I'm here in Sussex, where I can only remember and imagine. When I come to the farm, things have shifted... from one month to another, from one season to another. I've become a time traveller in the fen landscape.

Apple Trees

First March days, snow-striped furrows, the solitary heron
rising slow as a flag from his morning ditch.
Time to plant apples .

Laxton's Superb, Winston, Egremont Russet;
two rows, trees in pairs, an avenue for the cottage.
Close rain's perfect for dewing the roots of saplings

lined up, waiting to be sunk. Already I taste them
six years on, sugar-skins rough at my lips, a rush
of sour-sweet pulp;

spitting pips in long grass, September.
I imagine how I'll find myself then
remembering this cold booted feet heeling in apple sticks,

their rootballs clagged with soil;
thin rain now sleet
as we stiffen in wet coats, facing out the wind.