By Janet Sutherland

Skylarks have risen in full song the weald is blue

Too early yet for lambs the turf is short and winter

green Distance is key The shepherds skirt

the hills their dog a dark brown clot that dips

and feints always withdrawing as the flock rips and repairs towards the field edge and a gate

We see them flowing down the lane under the skeletons

of leafless trees Chalk, bark and fleece —the intersect

of movement in the ochre, brown and cream Buds

are about to burst these saplings zebra stripe the road

crowned with black buds still cold, still motionless

Janet Sutherland has five collections from Shearsman Books: The Messenger House (2023), Home Farm (2019), Bone Monkey (2014), Hangman’s Acre (2009) and Burning the Heartwood (2006). Her poems are widely anthologised, including in The Virago Book of Love Poetry and The New British Poetry 1968-88 (Paladin). In 2017 she won the Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition, and in 2018 received a Hawthornden Fellowship. She is a co-founder of the Needlewriters cooperative, which organises quarterly poetry events. janetsutherland.co.uk Poem selected by Jeremy Page, editor of quarterly literary magazine The Frogmore Papers. frogmorepress.co.uk