This poem is taken from PN Review 29, Volume 9 Number 3, January - February 1983.

A Journal from France

Gillian Clarke

Poems from Aubas, September 1979

SEPTEMBER 9TH

Somewhere in France (although I was navigator
I have no idea where it was)
we stopped the car on the straight road
running white between the tall corn.

We turned into a lane, a corridor
dividing the heat, marking its darknesses
with trees. There in the grass we picnicked.
There I was happy and you were not.

We had no names for the strange trees,
butterflies, the black and yellow spider
that ate the flies we startled into its trap.
In the silence we heard only swallows
and the hoarse, dry voice of the corn.

Later on that silent journey,
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