A cold and frosty December morning.  Two collared doves spiral twenty feet up from the ground.  Almost touching — I like to think they are courting.

I am in the garden, carrying wood (endlessly it seems) down to the wood shed, and the birds’ flight holds me.  The air still but for the beat of their wings, the sky blue, the sun breaking low through trees.  Little moments.

Somewhere, a wood pigeon coos, reminding me as ever of childhood, and something within me stills.  The impatience to get a job done and move on to the next.

Beautiful are these moments of noticing, when the eye drifts from the task, like now — the Menai silvering its blues — and I stop, have to stop. The wood I am carrying can wait. The job will get done.

During the pandemic, life similarly slowed. I remember now that there was a lot of talk then of work-life balance, and of how, with many working from home, with less people on the roads it became somehow human. The commute, largely, was gone; people spent more time with family, had more time to sit around; we worried less about being seen to get things done. ‘When it is over’, I heard many people say, ‘life needs a reset’. That was what many wanted.

And how fleeting the moment; how quickly capital reclaimed its slaves. Which makes it all the more important now to praise the small things.

I lost my job at the tail end of the pandemic. It was relatively well-paid, but I am thankful that I lost it. I scratch a living now — literally and metaphorically — but I count myself lucky, as now, to be able to stop when two birds take to wing.

Wood

The garden walked me six miles today
stepping up then down its terraced slope
then up and down again

again
ninety times along its twisting spine
to bend and load again

again
a tub of wood to rock
each step upon my thigh and

stack
stack
stack

down by the house as honeycomb
the stove will suck and chew
chortling through the long nights

Published in Response / Response, Dreich, 2021

*The English phrase ‘bring home the bacon’, means to earn enough money to live. In Welsh, the phrase ‘dod yn ol at fy nghoed’ (literally ‘to return to your trees’) translates into English as ‘to come to your senses’. In turn, the English phrase ‘come to your senses’ signifies a return to rationale thinking. Senses themselves (seeing, feeling, hearing etc.) are the means through which we act in and react with the world. In giving this piece the title ‘Bring home the wood’, I draw on all these references.