Three Somerset Sonnets by Nia Broomhall

The Floods and the Frogs

These fields were made for floods, the greener grass
an inch below the surface there. Each break
in winter cloud a flash of mirrored glass.
And backalong, frogs found that endless lake
and came, and came, and come again to spawn,
to claim the shallow greenlit world unseen.
But frogs and floods can’t keep the grass for long.
The fields dry up. The tadpoles drown in weeds.
We dipped our hands and clutched at the soft slip,
the quickened light. We fumbled jars to heft
the dripping marbles to the stream. We tipped
them in and wished them well. And then we left.
Each year the frogs flood back and then they go.
They make the same mistakes. They never know.

My Parents’ Accent

They sound like sun-warmed curves of hamstone now
to me. They sound like open fields and green
and blue. They whisper wisps of hay right down
the 303 behind an HGV.
They sound like shapes of hills, like bread, like sweet
inside a stalk, like rain on a brass band.
They sound like wooden spoons, like little leaps
in shiny shoes, like hands in pockets. And
with them, my voice sounds like that too. It rolls
in humming grass, unfurls and curls. It stays
a day or maybe two but it can’t hold
and when they go, for good, that voice will fade
from me like green, like light, like cows that cried
in fields behind their house on August nights.

Hedgerow

Two ways to do it: lopping, or laying.
The blade is quick as miles but leaves behind
a scream of bone-white splinters, ratchetings
of wings into a cold and lidless sky.
But laying brings a knife to nick the boughs,
the time to ease them down, plant woven stakes,
work twenty metres in a day to grout
the slow tilework of fields. A hedge will wait.
And braided life remains in layers then,
like ours. The birds can pick their way inside
a smaller hazel world that grows and smells
the same, where eggs are screened in dim green light,
in soft strata of leaves. And soon the frost
will retreat, and time and nothing is lost.

Nia Broomhall has finished her MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. Currently Head of English at a secondary school in Surrey, she has been an English teacher for 22 years. She has been Highly Commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize and published in Magma's 'Poems for Schools' and The Interpreter’s House.