Suffolk Soil Copyright © Victor Weston 2011

You can drive out from Bury in any direction
and you have only to look
on the soil, the selig Suffolk soil
the sweet contours of the folding land
and the green crops growing through

Go to remoter areas of this countryside,
to find where overspill
hasn’t yet intruded on the sacred clod
or un-rural infilling of “executive style residences” blight the eye

Out, you still can, to where wild birds sing
and simple flowers bloom
stand, be aware, breathe the air
look on open fields resting, smiling
gracing the view to the skyline

Around you soil, tilled by generations
of the same yeoman farming stock
before hard economics drove off first their labourers,
then others who belonged,
before it became uncouth agri-business

Pick up a handful of the dust and marvel
- a Pope once bent down and kissed the ground -
smell, whence comes
first crops, then wheat - the grain
a loaf that feeds

G_d breathed - it is said - life into men
he had made from the soil
to where our bodies return,
the attachment of a people to their own home-land
is intangible and real

It’s an emotional bond worldwide
in Tibet and Israel, with Aborigini,
rainforest indian, innuit,
Swiss peasant and Welsh hill farmer
each people with their soil

Mongolians and Masai roamed as the wilderbeest
over the earth
every tribe and people has evolved
and is created
needing such freedom,“to breathe”