A Poem by David Briggs

Landscape with Knackered Barn

A country road ribboning the foothills
of a limestone escarpment – to the south,

low-slung December sun silhouetting
hedgerows of willow and dogwood.

Rusting gate. Knackered barn.
Windswept blackthorn. I am fifty years old,

driving home in a recent-model car,
and the view is enabling

a contentment I’ve not felt for decades
to germinate inside me, though I know

it’s nothing more than a particular configuration
of sunlight and landscape and interiority

that mirrors a similar configuration
I experienced once, as a child,

in a field on the forest’s edge I’d walked to
from our mundane housing estate —

before Death first knocked on our door
with institutional eyes — like those moments

in which the contingencies we inherit
as birth-right recede, and there we are,

lit up inside our own private diorama.
I revelled in my escape from the estate,

at finding myself in an atavistic landscape
like those I’d pictured in the books

of my childhood reading, and I guess
that I must have attached that feeling

to what I’d found to hand around me —
a composition of low-slung December sun

silhouetting hedgerow, rusting gate,
knackered barn, windswept tree —

telling myself that if I banked this now
I’d be able to retrieve it in the future,

sometime when I most needed to,
after the thousand natural shocks etc.

It’s not kismet. It doesn’t mean anything.
Nothing more than a spider-thread linking

one flicker of consciousness across years
to another, causing this agreeable something

to happen inside me; yet, having wondered
so often if I’d make it even this far, for now,

driving this road to a home I almost think
I’d be content enough to live in till I die,

it’s almost enough.

A former Eric Gregory Award winner, David Briggs has published three full collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010), Rain Rider (2013), and Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), a Poetry Wales Book of the Year. In 2023 he completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter. His fourth book, The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems is due out in 2024.