Black Foot
There’s a bold black-footed ewe that visited us last summer,
gently nosed us as we dozed and snored in garden chairs
to learn the new scents of us, allow our strokes, to heft herself to us.
She is not ours – she wears the stamped gold and purple ear-tags of another
but for those ochred, long and lazy afternoons she roamed our lawn,
stamped three white feet, one black, into our earth, left her leavings.
The normal autumn came and she was taken from her proper work
of grazing down the forest, keeping our heathland in good order.
We don’t know what will become of her, whether she will ever
visit our open-gated garden for another season in the spring
or if she will only return there, find her way to our small patch,
chew the grass through these words, these lines, be hefted to this page.
.
Jill Munro has been published in major poetry magazines including The Frogmore Press, Popshot Quarterly and The Rialto. She won the O’Bheal Five Words International Poetry competition 2017/18. Jill’s debut collection ‘Man from La Paz’ was published in 2015 by Green Bottle Press. She won the Fair Acre Press Pamphlet Competition 2015 with ‘The Quilted Multiverse’, published April 2016. Jill was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2018 and has recently been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize 2019.
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