Smoke signals

I have friends who live up across two fields. Their elevated windows catch the setting sun and when I see smoke issuing from their chimney  I know they're at home.

Crossing the field

'To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.' Russian proverb

To cross the field on a sunset of spider-webs
Sprung and shining, thistle heads
White with tufts that are harvest
Tended and brought to fruit by no one,

to cross the long field as the sun goes down
and the whale-back Scillies show damson
twenty miles off, and the wind sculls
out back, and five lighthouses
one by one open their eyes,

to cross the long field as it darkens
when rooks are homeward, and gulls
swing out from the tilt of land
to the breast of ocean - now is the time
the vixen stirs and the green lane's
vivid with footprints

A field is not enough to spend a life in.
Harrow, granite and mattress springs,
shards and bones, turquoise droppings 
from pigeons that gorge on nightshade berries,
a charm of goldfinch, a flight of linnets,
fieldfare and January redwing
venturing westward in the dusk
all are folded in the dark of the field,

all are folded in the dark of the field
and need more days to paint them than life gives.
Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore was a poet and novelist who died last year, much too early, and wrote her final work in the knowledge that she did not have long to live.