“Prize Leicester Ewe,” from Biggle Sheep Book, Wilmer Atkinson Co., 1912
Digital image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
There’s the tangerine sun pressing
against green again, a declarative thing
like a hand on the neck of a sickened lamb.
It is the year I moved to England.
This time I bring my children. My son
wants to touch the sheep grazing the fen
next to our house. He learns sounds
animals make, how to say Mamma,
please. There’s gale-force wind again and
I am caught in a village of past trauma
where my ears hear a distant ring. My son
takes hold of the fence, calls into the storm
like a lamp, bright face against the sheets
of rain—excitement in danger—I press
his face to me, trying to keep him from
seeing the sheep tangled in wire, expression
shocked as if still in haste to flee.