To let a car get by, I’m standing in
a rife, rank, thigh-high corridor of growth,
along the bank beside a muddy lane,
the grasses doped by April’s summer heat,
and rain in torrents here in May. I look
up from this crowded contest for the light
to see, across the flag of brown ploughed earth,
at the wood’s edge, where giant oaks begin,
a gauzy film, a mist, and blink to check
it’s not my eyesight: bluebells, every plant
so hardly there, so insignificant,
that in their thousands they’re a fume of blue,
a clear, collective whisper cutting through
the press of upstarts that I’m standing in.