Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (6)

Soon the allotments will be deserted.
Ray from Bow has made his special salad,
the Cypriot Hassim has sliced his spuds,
nurtured them with salt. In the work shed
they've laid out the last of the harvest,
grapes and olives, leeks, cabbages, parsnips.
Along with the carrots and beets, from
the damp earth they've pulled up their thoughts,
dreams of better lives, the thrill of putting down
a deposit, inheritance; the days that a square
patch of London would breed dates, callaloo,
sweet potatoes the size of your head,
things not seen since childhood, homeland,
the family hearth, some long forgotten feast.

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Michael McKimm is from the Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland. He graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. His poetry has appeared most recently in Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review and The Warwick Review, and is forthcoming in Dossier Journal (New York). His first collection, Still This Need, will be published in 2009.

Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (5)

In creating the Marsh they created
an island. Surprisingly sensible
a solution, appease the bargemen
and the mill owners, let the New River
Company have their fill for Londoners,
simply cut a canal and let the water
take a different course twice over,
one for cargoes up and down from Hertford,
one to turn the stones and grind the corn
to flour. And that was that, flat unbuilt land
lurching southwards towards the Isle of Dogs,
whitewashed lock-side pubs, fishermen
relishing the pike: reservoir, reserve,
an archipeligo conjured from commerce.

Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (4)

Cormorants are landing on the Lammas Lands.
We watch them from the side of the canal,
four black phantoms coming in slow from the north,
all hush-hush, wings arched for the landing,
feet carving a line, long bodies glistening
in the water. Someone needs to document
the birds that use this stretch of water for their nests:
bitterns, grebes and ruddy ducks, great groups
of Canada geese, reed buntings calling thinly
from the willow, the pecking war of coots
and moorhens, the fearful jays, the timid teal,
but mostly the stealth-breaking cormorants,
drying their wings on the branches of trees,
like standards on the blue-shield of the sky.

Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (3)

There is a white wind and a clanging bell
across the marsh, a frisson in the wires
that slice the pitches, where ping on leather
meets the thump of white-paint post, branches
clacking in the trees, tarpaulin unravelling
on the building sites: grit, sand and aggregate.
Think of the causeway that the Romans built
to keep their road going straight to Colchester,
a heap of shale and shattered boulders paved
with smoother slabs set into concrete, the coarse
rudus, the soft nucleus, then curved to let
rainwater slip into the fields. Suddenly
there is an army cutting a line through
the Sunday fixtures, a legion of pallbearers.

Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (2)

This is where King Alfred beached the Danes,
cut channels in the Lea, created the marsh,
and, post-battle, post-hot-scorched summer,
post heady festival of loafmass, gave them over
kindly to the serfs as common land, to graze
their cattle and tackle the unshodden horses.
Land too thick for crops, too wet for housing,
land wept cunningly from warfare, strategy,
pre-planned hard labour of soldiers, slaves,
serfs, was handed over, piecemeal, between
August and March, as feeding space, lambing
land, recreation ground, where people came
from the parishes of Homerton and Hackney
to break the bread, to celebrate the harvest.

Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (1)

Six Poems for Hackney Marsh

What I shall miss is the smell at the end
of the street, the sound of water gushing
under Hackney - marsh-water, Lea Valley
tribulations, all that's dank and dead in
hidden liquid: history mainly, flooded
plains scuttling Viking warships, sewer-tales
and monies made from bodies, layers of clay
and chalk and once-crisp water, drinkable
by seamen down at Limehouse. If you think
of water as the thing that builds a town
you can't imagine living where the river
doesn't run, even if that river is a stream
that swells with rainfall, coming up from drains
and forever whispering beneath your feet.

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Gists and Piths will be publishing 'The Lammas Lands' in six consecutive installments. Tune in tomorrow for section two. . .