Green
You slip through the gap in the sandstone wall
and turn in among the trees,
the stone-grey columns of beech.
The sound of your steps is hollow, the path
dry and cracked after so little rain.
Bramble and nettle and falls of ivy
half screen the space of the field,
where a few people are walking their dogs,
small children are chasing a ball.
You are, or might be, a boy in a hide
keeping watch through the long afternoons,
held tight as a closed fist
inside the pleasure of not being seen
– but after a while the feeling comes
that something does see you,
some thin persistent tendril
involving itself in you, like the bindweed
that twines itself along the hedgerows
and with a quick convulsive shake of the mind
you get going, telling yourself
it’s time anyway you were heading back.