Walk Bleary and sad sap-eyed, we step out to the peak through mist and coralled clouds, chests clenched with phlegm, calves stiff with age lost, as the green woodpecker loops over the combe’s edge to the field fringe. There a tip-toeing deer sniffs the sun, sniffs the dew, strips the laurel, strips the few daffodils brave enough to brave the snows of January storms to come. The buzzard hangs without our worry, floats on the winter’s  crisp , starched air, screams soft and turns tilting above the frost-dropped twigs from the ash trees lined above the Church Ground. Rabbits flush-furred by a wind hard from the west, sweep back their ears as they scrape deep into the Razor’s weak soil, their droppings now gleaming bullets, egg-cupped in black nests scooped from the thin Down. On the climb, we’ve thought only of Helen, who’s brave enough to stare, now riding on the sharp wind which tears out our tears, salt-staining our cheeks. She’s already trimmed our fears of the grinning ninny, death.          The sun bo-peeps like a baby through the dove grey slips of mottled clouds catching rose-tinted furrows as we stride downhill, mud-slipping sideways, ripping the shroud of slime-cropped green now cloaking our years, and we walked because we could and we walked to waste our fears. < back