Extracts from
Silence at Ramscliffe
© James Crowden

THE LAST STRAW

Bedding down
Creature comforts
The Last Rites

The sky reflected
As if nothing was wrong
An act of kindness

Betrayal
Lives that have not yet
Had their full span

Thrown into the wind
An empty space
Where the heart should be

  

FOOT AND MOUTH

There is fear in the air.
You can feel it climbing over hedges
Passing from farm to farm
Invisibly trailing its white coat
Across the fields.

You can hear it crackle
Like a forest fire.
It lives in kitchens
And in the news reports,
In the eyes of children
And in the hunched expressions
Of their animals.

Even the dogs have gone wild
With uncertainty.


DANGER - NOTIFIABLE DISEASE

In silence, the overall situation,
Hung, drawn and quartered,
Entrails burnt in Studio 4
Sentences handed down to condemned prisoners.

No leniency for good behaviour. No parole.
No quarantine for the healthy.
The video nasty arrives on the doorstep.
Judge Jeffreys hard at it in the killing sheds,

"Don't waste ye court's time by pleading ye innocence"
'Massacre of the Unsuspecting', Fast forward
'Quirks of the Spanish Inquisition', re-run, again and again.
Ritual slaughter coming to a farm near you.

Primitive pits overlain with old railway sleepers,
Straw, palettes, kerosene, red diesel and coal,
Ready to burn, witches at the stake,
Scapegoats etched into the impatient skyline.

The virulent disease, elusive, hounded, snookered,
A new strain bulldozed into a corner,
The smell of death crumbling in on itself,
Rook to Queen's pawn. Pot black. Pol Pot. Check mate.