Nancy Gaffield
Rumenea
at the beginning:
wetlands
grassland
mud flats
then sand dunes land of
shams draggle-tail delusions deliquium
the Reverend Barham, writing in 1793, called it the Fifth Continent
after Europe, Asia, Africa, America
Romney Marsh
Welland Marsh
Denge Marsh
farmlands too
Brookland
The Dowel’s
Highknock
so many autumns, ay, and winter days, spent outside
trying to hear what was in the wind
it was always like this carcasses flayed by the wind
vargavinter [svenska]: wolf-winter
deep biting wind
wolves hunting
sheep
—Do you ever think about moving inland?
—Why would I? Somebody’s got to stay. Somebody’s got to remember.
(today the insects are going missing
you’ll notice it
along the canal
in your garden
under streetlights
on your windscreen
the sheer quantity of absence the sixth
extinction)
I am eglande
gouty with streams
quivering polder
ancient landscape
my patterns Saxon: lanes
villages
ditches
those later
drained the marsh
populated it
after the plague land put down
to sheep pasture
(five hundred years pass)
factories
tips
bungalows
Welland Marsh Little Cheyne Court
wind farm
salt marsh
reclaimed for grazing
no public roads
no settlement
long and uninterrupted
light
Against all manner of pestilence and plague
Brookland Farms strong linear landscape
(field boundaries)
parallel lines of willow
ragged hawthorn
fertile, peaty soil
arable
with tracks
still in tact
on the horizon the scarp the houses of the High Weald
a crowded mantelpiece
above a fruitful plain
and Dowels Farmland
pastoral fields divided by
a drainage ditch
crossed by a wooden plank
waterlogged
boggy reeds
and rushes
relics of sheep grazing
isolated
looker’s huts
Fairfield Church in sheep pasture
deep layers
of peat
no hiding the sun
the moon
the truth
(marshlands are natural carbon sinks
lose them we also lose their capacity
to absorb carbon
lose them
the carbon
they’ve absorbed
over thousands
of years
is released)
the grass when the wind passes over it bends
Dungeness Shingle vegetated scree scattered cottages
and power stations
nearest the shore
constantly evolving
evidence of prehistoric tools
Roman salt making amongst the rubbish
hair clips
ring pulls
bic lighters
natural shingle
bestows
horizontal form
the lighthouse
the power station
vertical structure
the only desert
in western
Europe
10,000 years ago
chalk bedrock warmed and frozen
broke part
washed down into flint nodules
by rivers
washed down
into the English Channel
out of synch land
decrepit fishing huts
railway carriages
horizons of pylons
a town called Hope
built on the razor’s edge
rendered null
(in the early part of day
heard a stray goose
groping about
over the water
as if
lost or like
the spirit of the fog)
the Dymchurch Wall has been maintained
for eight hundred years
“A wall is fear in three dimensions”
20th century bungalows
caravan parks
housing estates
below sea level threatened
by the sea
threatened
by invasion
Martello Towers stand
aloof
spit of shingle breached
by storms
marsh phantoms
a scarecrow
(dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by)
St Clements at Old Romney
had a secret passageway
to the undertaker’s
the blood of
Dr Syn’s smugglers
lingers in the ditches
the marsh frog laughs
wa ha ha wa ha ha
and all that’s left
of Ogarswick
is a cross that marks
the spot
St Nicholas New Romney
still bears the scars
of the storm [1247]
four feet of sand and shingle
filled the port
the Rother Estuary
relocated to Rye
New Romney buried in debris
declined
you can see the flood levels
on the church pillars
rooks in shaggy trousers
grumble and gripe
(am barrel jellyfish
90% water and my small dense tentacles contain hundreds of little mouths
am brown-tailed moth caterpillar
populating the sea hawthorn in ever larger numbers
as the temperatures rise
we evening primrose red valerian
cover the shingle
and I the pygmy footman moth
love lichen and light
am sea am something
that doesn’t love a wall)
Near permanent flooding predicted for Romney Marsh
More intense storm surges
Loss of peat → release of methane →
Higher temperatures in summer and winter
Warmer weather → greater stress on trees
Increased rainfall and storm events
New pests and disease
Marshland reclaimed by the sea
Notes
- The title Rumenea is an Old English name for Romney (Marsh), meaning “at the spacious, or wide, river”. Romney Marsh is in Kent, in the southeast corner of England.
- Italicised material is from Walden by Henry David Thoreau. This poem is part of a longer sequence entitled Weald[en].
- Salvator Winter and Francis Dickinson in Julian Walker (2013) How to Cure the Plague & Other Curious Remedies. London: The British Library Books.
- The word eglande dates to Cnut of Kemble’s Charter dated 1023.
Nancy Gaffield is the author of five poetry publications, most recently Meridian (Longbarrow Press 2019). She adapted her first book of poems, Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011) into a libretto; the opera, composed by Nicola LeFanu, premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival in 2014 before touring nationally. Her recent work, Weald[en], explores the consonance between nature, poetry and electronic music. She lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.