Ron Scowcroft’s Moon Garden was the first pamphlet of someone else’s work to be published by Wayleave. The title poem has long been a favourite of mine and obviously caught other imaginations as well because on my wall I have a lovely painting based on this poem by his artist friend John Morrison. We had hoped to use this as the cover, but it didn’t photograph well and was too subtle for reproduction.

Moon Garden

This is my tranquility, my white dust.
I signed false names, trusted no-one,
fooled speculators, usurpers, said it would be lunacy
to take such a worthless patch as this,
claimed my fallow space, piece by careful piece.

I dug for moon water, made a moon well, full and round,
wished for grass and grass grew.
In shadowless night I dreamed
silver cattle at the crater’s edge,
and in the haze of morning they grazed,
gave milk at the pail, milk so rich and fat it fell to curds,
waxed in time, halved, carved to a rind, to a cradle.

I dreamed of wheat, of flour new ground
in powdered footprints by my window and my table,
planted beans that broke to light like swans,
that climbed with flowers so sweet they filled this airless air
with fumblings of silent bees.

When evening comes I wait to sleep again,
place my back against the soil,
raise my hand to a cloudless sky
and cover the distant blue of earth with my thumb.

To me it’s a poem that expresses perfectly the secret territory of the heart, the romantic counterbalance to the everyday world of brusque and abrasive hurly-burly. And it’s hard won, starting with the stealth and subterfuge of the first stanza to gain access to the ‘moon well’ in the second. In the benign, muted atmosphere of ‘silent bees’ and ‘beans that broke to light like swans’, I’m shrouded, as a reader, in the calm ‘shadowless night’ cast by everyday technicolour.

When Ron reads this poem, he invariably refers to Caliban in The Tempest. “Monstrous and dangerous, he is also capable of kindness and is sensitive to the natural world of the island he inhabits” he says. ‘”Referred to at one point as a ‘moon calf’, he is slave and victim controlled and manipulated by those who wish to take his island from him.”

So, despite the way everyday pressures cause us to behave, there is always the refuge of a moon garden, where we can quietly and defiantly make that gesture in the poem’s last line.

There will be a chance to hear Ron reading at Brewery Poets, Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal on Friday 22nd May, alongside Jane Routh and Andy Forster.