Recently, I’ve started to follow a few poetry blogs, and last week, David of The Skeptic’s Kaddish, accepted a challenge: to write a Quatern.
A what? This …
Not just any old quatern however. This one has to contain the word ‘quiet’. I thought I’d have a go too. It happens that this fits quite nicely into my self-imposed challenge, set as I looked yet again at my geological map of Great Britain. What’s it like for worms? Some of them contend with sandy soil, others heavy clay. Some soil is chalky, some loamy, and what must soil up in the old coalfields be like? Or that thin acid soil of the moorlands?
I’ve written a gaggle of poems about worms, each one living in a different kind of soil: I obviously don’t get out enough. Each poem uses a different verse form. So why not sum the whole worm thing up in a quatern?
Quiet - can you hear a sound?
The barley rustles in the breeze.
A buzzard mewls, the crows confer,
The rabbits waken. Dusk descends.
Below the ground it’s different though -
Quiet - can you hear a sound?
There are no noises from the worms
who turn the earth, eat leaves and chaff.
Their world of darkness is not ours.
They churn the soil by night and day.
Quiet - can you hear a sound
as worms keep soil in rude good health?
There’s life above, there’s life below -
each dependent on the other.
Do not dismiss the lowly worm:
quiet - can you hear a sound?
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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