A Passing

[Brownlie]

It carried scent of ferns, unfurled a smell
of loose barked silver birch and stretching oaks.
Then dallied by the poplar's narrow strokes
and wooed a hermit thrush that trilled along
on branch; its spotted breast so proud in song.
The parted bluebells swayed, within the glade
as chorused foxglove sang aloud in shade,
the mottled woodland wrapped me in its spell.

The years, like winds of old have bled away
and with them flew the softness of the trees.
now terracotta houses rise like sails.
and sewerage pipes are threaded through the brae.
No more the wooded hills, no more the breeze.
No more summer's dell, no more the vales.

---

i pronounce sewerage as sew ridge

I will come back to this poem later and give it some more analysis, but I really enjoyed where the poem went in the second stanza. One immediate critique I can give is that you start the poem with it and it is hard to tell what the it your referring to is. The terracotta houses and especially the sewer pipes were salient parts of the poem for me.