This is one of my favourite places, The Oak Barn, in Shropshire, and this is where I will be this week as I am going to be the guest poet at a special concert given by Ludlow's "Larks" Community choir. I am really pleased to be asked back - I read here last year. But this year I am especially delighted to be doing this because they are going to sing one of my poems that has been set to music by Polly Bolton. This will be the second time this year I'll have had the pleasure of hearing one of my poems sung and, believe me, it is a truly uplifting experience. It transforms your poem not only into wonderful sound, but new meaning. The first time it happened for me, I was very close to tears, joyful, wonderful tears.

The poem I am going to hear sung is:

Lark

It pauses, then with a push of wings,
swims upward through the air,
all the time singing,
scattering notes like bright pennies,
bold in the copper sky.

Soon the lifting silhouette is gone.
All you can see now is the song.



This is the version of the poem that appeared in my pamphlet Uncertain Days, published by Happenstance Press. I hope next time I read it in public I'm not going to be expected to sing it...

And how apt that it is being sung by a choir called Larks!

Battle of the Skies

On a warm Sunday afternoon recently I was sitting quietly in my garden doing nothing in particular, when I began to notice, on my right, some insects flying up from somewhere near the ground. They flew up at intermittent intervals, five or six of them at a time, but frequently enough to make me realise something special was happening.

Just as I stood up to go and look more closely, the air above my head was suddenly dark with what felt like every swift, swallow and housemartin in the area, swooping and diving so rapidly through the long narrow space of my garden that I could feel the rush of displaced air.

The insects were flying ants, and they were a real bonanza for all these hirondines: I sat down to watch and as the ants flew up, the birds would arrow in so fast and snatch them, turning back to fly through again. It was like watching a dog-fight from some film of World War Two. The sound of wings, the blacking out of the air space above my head, and every now and then I heard the tiny Snick! as beak met ant. It was amazing.

One of those moments that only come on rare occasions, a treasured moment of insight into how wild things live. Or don't, in the case of the ants...