to burn
on any waste
anygrig, ling, heath, furze, goss or fern
is punishable with whipping and confinement in the house of correction

Yet the fires are lit
and ‘get to a masterless head’

while out in Russia, the steppes are strummed by the wind
to make a low music,
songs twinned with us, whose drumming refrain we are
beginning to know by heart

podzol podzol podzol

The old coat
consumed in the blaze
had left in its pockets something for the Heathen
potash, glass, soap, bricks

but the bracken is crackling

Krasnodar Krai, it whoops, and the limping Ilyushins and drunken
Tupolevs reply

podzol

The mineral soil is grey, the humus pan is red, the iron pan
like our underash
black and the Heath is blackened as if it were a lava flow

while out in Leningradsky District, they can only imagine our stripes
and polygons
our mosaic of limewoods and hazelwoods and oakwoods

bracken, bell
heather, gorse,

already beginning to

sprout as Gilbert White predicted