Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits: cotton growing in the Mississippi delta. 

Chickens

I come from hay and barns, raising

chickens. In spring, lambs come.

You got to get up, fly early, do the orphan run

sleep till dawn, start the feeding.

When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice.

You keep the animals watered.

You walk through the barn, through the hay smell,

your hair brittle where you chopped it with scissors

same ones you use for everything. Your sweater has holes.

When you feed the ram lambs, you say goodbye.

Summer, choke cherries; your mouth’s dry. Apples, cider.

Corn picking. Canning for weeks that feel like years.

Chopping heads off quail, rabbits, chickens.

You can pluck a chicken, gut it fast.

You find unformed eggs, unformed chicks.

They start chirping day nineteen.

You make biscuits and gravy for hundred kids

serve them up good. You’re the chick

who never got past day nineteen, never found your chick voice.

You make iced tea. They say, you’re a soldier in the king’s army.

At night, you say to yourself, Kathy, someday.

We go walking. We go talking. We find a big story.

A cracking egg story. A walking girl story.

A walking out of the woods story. A not slapped silly story.

A not Jesus story. Hush, Kathy you say, we get out of here.

We find out where chicks go when they learn to fly.

Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits was taken only a couple of days ago - on Thursday of this week. 

With England in Lockdown II (although my locality has been either in lockdown or under special restrictions for 7 out of the last 8 months), I have resumed the Covid-19 canal walks - walking sections of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. 

Thursday’s walk picked up where I last left off - at St Peter’s Church, East Marton and then followed the Leeds-Liverpool Canal east. I turned about at Bank Newton, by the locks, and returned to my starting point - electing to take the bridleways and public footpaths rather than re-tracing my steps along the canal. 

It was late afternoon and the sun was setting. Just where Bank Newton passes over Trenet Beck, I took the photo through the slats of a five-barred gate, taking in the landscape to the south.

Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits is a shot taken only a couple of days ago, on one of my Covid-19 walks along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. It shows the view looking east from the bridge at St Peter’s Church, East Marton. You can see the shadow cast by my upraised arms on the water. 

excerpt from Farm by the Shore

Thomas A. Clark

small oats rye bere barley ripe harvest in late summer a shallow ploughing grazing and fallow in rotation

corncrake and corn bunting great yellow bumble bee oystercatcher lapwing golden plover orchid vetch and clover

when no one is home the strawberry roan stands in the rain forlorn

mattress of heather of bracken or eelgrass pillow of cottongrass stuffed with a down of coltsfoot or reedmace floor strewn with bog myrtle

strong rope of heather honeysuckle bridle twisted birch bark tether fish trap of sedge purple moor-grass anchor rope