Love Returns to The Lavender Farmer

Two days for harvest; the cutter,
like a truffling hog, swaying along
the humped and violet lanes. The air
was lavender, their hands, the sacks,
the soles of their shoes, and their hair
as they lay together in the night.

One month on, he reads her text
again and again, each short word
linked like the carriages of her train
he’ll meet at dusk, the silent station
damp with today’s rain; in his hand
the dozen stems whose hues of healed-
bruise he picked from the field’s edge
where they’d lain hidden. Missed.

 

Craig Dobson has been published in The London Magazine, The North, The Rialto, Agenda, Stand, New Welsh Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Under the Radar, Orbis, Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Frogmore Papers and Poetry Daily.