There's a new housing estate being built nearby
between Hamilton and Strathaven
not far from the one that was built last year,
both built on fields that once formally housed sheep and cows
and, informally mice and foxes and badgers and all sorts of birds.
They come now to our back garden
pushed from their centuries-old homes
our back garden, beside our house
that was built thirty years ago
on a bing that was cleared
to make way for houses
after a century of coal mining
on what was once fields
where mice and foxes and badgers and all sorts of birds
once had their home.
war is what you conceive it to be.
