Losing the Sounds of Spring

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

                                                Seamus Heaney

In the north, the Plough is ridden by the moon
and frost continues to clench the earth.
On this early morning walk there are no words,
no lines from puffs of frozen breath nor
vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

Punctuated by stone and root, fields fold
into ferrous grooves girthed by silhouettes
of stringent hedgerows. No birdsong festoons
the branches of trees to forecast the zing of spring,
the mildest February for twenty years.

Above inscrutable darkling woods, owls hook stars
caught among branches, predatorial eyes
flashing and blinking in pre-dawn gloom.
A pale feather drifting on a breath of wind
is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound.

A scattering of rooks, star-black twinkles,
survey their nests and alight in treetops;
without their cawing, no stern warning
to stealers of eggs. I am all eyes, I am not
vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Kim M. Russell, 12^th February 2026

It’s Tuesday and, at the dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa is hosting Poetics with an exploration of the senses.

She says that was thinking recently about what the world would be like in the absence of any of the senses. She reminds us that it is subjective thing as we experience the world through different lenses’. She says “no two people ‘hear’ the same song in the exact same way. Some people experience colour blindness… One person might experience the taste of a thing differently than another.”

Melissa has given us definitions of each of the five senses as she would like us to focus on one of them and write poems exploring what our life experience might be without that sense.

I reworked a glosa from April 2022, for which I took a quatrain from Sonnet I of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Glanmore Sonnets’,