Ashes Poetry

View from my study window in winter

Gardening With Afridi

With a wave of the hand the umpire signals four
to move the scorers’ score behind their boundary edge
while commentators caw at the kites’ wait
to escalate up and down a local thermal’s ledge
which sentinels the parched dry sky above the city.

Waves of air bowlers seek to bend off straight,
sun beats shadows, police beat stands, heart beats still,
ball beats bat, audible snick, the crowd’s roar
a signal beyond the ionosphere
lobbed back by the keeper of the BBC
through a field of critically stationed orbiting acolytes:
close-in astral catchers pouch each chance
to sledge the edge thousands of miles back to me

alone admid mid-November scruffiness;
the undug plot a leafless scoresheet, unweeded,
ready to be broken by spade and forked
over to break again, frost opening a perennial innings
near the start and heart of earth’s eventual disintegration
to nothing. Long waves halfway around the world.

A bombscare. The entire ground stops to stare
and Shahid Afridi plants his boots on the length of the pitch
to turn over earth like me – no one else watching.

Given the intent of the marks he made,
could he not do with my fork and spade?

Words are spoken, a shrug and a glare mid-wicket,
“This isn’t cricket,” they say on the air,
“He’s sure to cop it.” Rogation to follow his boots’ rotation,
a worm at my feet tries to wriggle away.

Close of play edges the start of my day,
shadows stretch across the ground
as the same sun sneaks up the hill of winter-stripped beeches
behind me. In Faisalabad, Derbyshire, I hear
the mullahs call the faithful to prayer.
Minaret horns blare from the wireless world
before they go off air. Alone Shahid slips
the field to face his maker’s mark and means.
Together we stop to flick sweat from our brow
at the wonder of it all. I’m gardening with Afridi.

Shahid, a pathan as well as a Pakistani, comes from the troubled lands of Afganistan, so it all seems quite trivial now. In the new year I succumbed to calcium pyrophosphate deposition disorder, and spent about four months not doing much but listening to cricket on the radio. ‘Once I’m better,’ I thought, ‘I could write poetry about the next Ashes series.’  Arts Council England, East Midlands thought it was a good idea too, which is why you’re reading this now.