FENMAN

FENMAN


Fenman loves to take the hand of nature
As he walks the banks of the River Glen in spring
From old Kate’s Bridge down to Tongue End Pump
He’ll tread the paths and walk the byways
He’ll peer out over the Baston Edge
He’ll hear the melodious running water
Jiggling down between her raised breasts
He’ll trample on down by the ghost of Jubilee Bridge
And ride with the Swallow on its wing

His senses here are stroked by nature
The hairs are standing on his neck
Creating shivers on his spine
Gazing out and over the Wilderness
Sees once black bog
Now a cultured green
The Peat that built up over millennia
Is such a pleasure to be seen
The brilliant skills of migrant Dutchmen
Have left their mark upon this land
And drained it fertile

There are ghostly silouettes of long dead Oaks
As black and as hard as a Fen-man’s hat
His ever changing monument
To the prehistoric forest

Fenman is at home in this landscape
As he ambles on down to Tongue End’s tip
He looks up west and sees
The acned spot
Where tired steel refreshes
In creative heat
The Foundry of the Fen

He’ll stumble over a startled pheasant
That flees away in diarrhoeic haste
His own adrenalin freely flowing
At its sudden flight

Fenman here is the hand of nature
And here the hand has been well led
The mighty hand is steered by Farmers
It is big steel fingers that shape this heaven
With power that comes from Fossil Muscle
Belching its breath into the high ozone

Fenman now communes with nature
Keeps the landscape looking clean
Spring is changing the deep black peat
To a million shades of exotic green
Myriad little green soldiers
Standing erect In dead straight lines
Bending their backs in obedience
To the winds command
Fenman knows the harvest will come

Fenman strides the Bourne Eau Spoil
Where St Peter’s tears of joy
Flow down towards the Glen
Streaming over the cheeks of heaven
For this is a face of God

Fenman strolls up to the Car Dyke turn
Heading back to his homely twins
Northorpe and Thurlby are their given names
Finds the place where attendant nursing Angels
Have used their skills to attend the sick
A Hospital
Bourne Chest by name

A mile it is to Northorpe Fen
When Car Dyke Bridge looms into sight
Romans built this waterway
What a presence they still have today

It fills his soul to overflow
As he views the horizon on the east
His heart beats a great deal faster
As he’s drawn across the new Poole Bridge
St Firmin’s Churchyard
A thousand years there stood
For this is where the bodies of Fenmen lie
In the dank cold ground they’ve turned to dust
They are alive forever
Alive in this nature

Wherever Fenman goes
Between the River Glen and Bourne Eau banks
He is with the eternal trio
The Past
The Present
And the Future
This is where his soul is

For Fenman
This is home
The city is not par
With this