June
(After an illumination in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry)
A meadow swelters in June heat.
Painted in front for the reader's delight,
two tall women are raking hay.
Swaying in rhythm on bare feet
they're dancers gowned in sky-blue light.
Smaller, half a field away,
men swing scythes through weary hours,
bulrushes grow in mud, willows
border the bank, and across the Seine
the city looms: battlements and towers,
pinnacles, church spires, windows:
crowded stone, with barely a soul to be seen.
A boatman pushes back from the shore.
A man's legs vanish up a water stair.
Edmund Prestwich
