The housewives will be polishing their paint,
or washing a front path still wet with rain;
weeding bare beds where daffodils stand
singly, each a sterile foot apart. Long
since, they have forgotten the wild world
of violence and birth, and have sunk back
into a pretty street of painted boxes.

The heavy sheep wait patiently for food
together, but soon they will choose privacy,
lying down in corners, pawing, circling,
in the intense, ritualistic,
bloody effort of lambing.

In the dry weather it’s a hopeful job.
Sun on the back, working coatless, you can
outwit a hesitant ewe; kneeling, sort
and assist to birth her jumbled twins;
carry the newborn to a nursery field
with their dam trotting anxiously behind.

Spring storms are miserable. At dawn,
draped in a coat still clammy-damp with rain,
you stumble out in muddy wellingtons.
The sheep are sheltered half a mile away
down the steep bank, below the boundary wall.
Only a shepherd would go out to count them,
seeking to pair-up ewes and rain-chilled lambs
under the lashing of a force nine gale.

Here a lamb is flattened to the grass, dead,
the ewe returning constantly, to sniff
and lick his sodden coat. Captured by guile,
and coaxed indoors, she’ll stand imprisoned till
a strange lamb can be fostered in his place,
and even then, she may stand many days
before she thinks him hers, and can be freed.

Then when a day dawns fine, and all the flock
lies quiet in the sun, maybe you’ll go
into the village to stock up with food.
You pass the pretty boxes, paintwork flat
blue or strident red, and there they are, all
the busy housewives, polishing their brasses,
dusting the pointless nick-nacks on the shelves;
They wipe off raindrops which the sun betrays,
then, hanging fresh net curtains at the glass,
dare life to spot the tidiness within.