Rabbiting

“There's ever some young rabbits up that field

Where Lady and them two foals is”,
Grit-voiced, laden-eyed Omri my uncle says,
Aims, intentions smartly inward-folded.

His checked felt fisherman's hat dips down to the front
Like a cloche for the torque of his ranging mind
As it courses its tamped old tracks through counties
Counting for part-worlds, possibly counting for worlds
As it runnels its bracken-edged, massively finite footways.

Pipe-voiced, rivulet-iris eyed young Mushi
Is ten. His downy eyebrows flick as he checks his noiseless breath:

A twelvemonth's been and gone since the field and the rills,
The tracks, the Black Widow branded caddypults cocked for tracking
Them flitsome shushis. Mushi already knows kind of maybe how
He would twang the smoothest stones in ten yard, tail-off sickles of shallowest air

In a now
In again, in a now; how the best ones are hard, unyielding, heavy and certain and small,
Masquerading as quail eggs, yet could kill.

“We'll go up there on Friday, how about that?” said Omri,
Narrowing both eyes, pinching the prow of his hat.

-

Come this Friday, school will be longer; longer, collapsed and inane:
The words on the books might change and stretch
But the paper will look the same.

But come that twenty past three, and the rubberised creak
Of a hundred children's chairs on lino, marking the crash of the week
I'll belt up the side of the playing field furlongs, swinging
A hooked curve clean through the Y of the stile; and there

Will my uncle Omri be, and we
Will have more than a dying to aim at.