Today over 40 poets and lovely attentive audience members turned up on a hot, humid afternoon to take part in ‘Poems for the Farm’. It was the culmination of my three month residency at Acton Scott Historic Working Farm – and it was great! Some 20 poets came along to read, and they generously read work too from poets who couldn’t be here today.
Here are the first readers, all ready to go.
Meg Cox reads: ‘clumps of black suckling pigs/ leggling lambs/ a water of ducks/ and Charlie…’
Frank reads: ‘the ducks’ green heads, their orange feet/ a drop of brown pond water/ a goose with his head in a bucket…’
I read for Jacob: ‘Piglets/ their little noses/ their hunger/ their curly tails’…
Julia Dean Richards reads: ‘Then trudge up the cock-crowing nature-knowing tractor track…’
Peter Holliday reads: ‘He’s been docking mangolds/ From dawn to dusk:/ In rain, in sleet, in icy cold…’
Paul Francis reads: ‘Just take a pen, and have a go, she said./ It seemed so innocent. Give it a try./ And that was all it took for me to write/ the words I never knew were in my head.’
Nina Lewis reads: ‘The pumpkin, orange cart/ with scalloped undercarriage/ and devilled forked hinges.’
Colin Fletcher reads: ‘Viewers will remember only that wise head/So steady on its saucer of winged collar.’
Time for cream teas and Richard’s squeezebox!
Poet on the Farm 
Reblogged this on Jean Atkin and commented:
A poetry and cream-tea fuelled finale to my residency at Acton Scott Historic Working Farm. So grateful to all who responded, visited, messaged, blogged and emailed. On the last count, 96 poems were written ‘for the Farm’ by poets from at least three different continents during the residency.