Esther Morgan Esther Morgan's first collection, 'Beyond Calling Distance', is available from these pages at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com and directly from Bloodaxe. She edits Reactions, an anthology of new poetry, the 3rd edition of which is published this month by Pen&inc press, Norwich. See events and links pages for details. To read four poems from 'Reactions 3' click here

The Cows · · · The Sleep-walker · · · The Reason

The Cows They appeared in summer, huge shoulders shambling through the gloom, pushing through air like green water. Their patience drew me, the way they flicked their ears, submitted to the bluebottles that glittered their eyes, or their passive resistance to rain, huddled in the lea of the hawthorn, water coursing their mountainous flanks. My mother thought them dangerous, their hooves churning the field to mud. She warned me to keep the barbed fence between us, but I always slipped through to stand like a priest or sacrifice in the midst of their steaming henge. They seemed to dream as they chewed the cud, working their cool alchemy, earth into cream, dung as rich as cake mixture. I knew in Africa nomads tapped their throats for blood, in India they wandered sacred, untouched, measuring the dust between villages. I made them offerings - handfulls of grass proffered shyly, honoured if they slubbered my palms clean. The tags in their ears made them gipsyish and I longed to follow them, their slow hypnosis under the moon stealing me through the meadow and into the mist that made ghost ships of the silver birches. But they only shifted their weight in the mud, garlanded by the evening sun, oblivious under their haloes of flies. The Sleep-walker She returns when the garden's a drift of bluebells her hands lose themselves among cool stems, her wicker basket brims with petals curling like woodsmoke, sprigs of snow from the broken apple tree that will shed itself by morning.   She wanders further into the dusk drawn by the glimmer of the chestnuts' candles the hazy lace of cow parsley to stand with eyes shut under a dusting of early stars feeling the evening warmth steal through her:   a trace of intimacy her skin remembers; the brush of something soft a flicker in the air like dreaming lids . . . she hears voices calling through the mist and turning back   turns into the girl who came to herself in deep grass, her bare arms freckled with pollen the hem of her nightdress soaked with dew, its whiteness pinned by moths. The Reason It's because you never left these endless fields where an oak tree sails the horizon like a lost galleon where rabbits crouch in mad-dog heat under a sky full of eyes where a gunshot scatters acres of birds leaving wires like empty staves where a road runs straight for hours towards a shimmering spire where a man can live all his life beyond calling distance.