Poetry Thursday - Urgent by Sheila Wingfield

(via)

Urgent

Villages pass under the plough
In England, where there was plague,
And lets time slide over parishes
The way hedges are torn out.
Bulldozers flatten a hill:
Even continents slip.
Everything must elide or kill
As the wild aurochs died.
And our elms. We have
Barely a minute now.

Sheila Wingfield (1906-1992)


Because both her father and husband disapproved of her interest in literature and poetry, it was only after her husband's death in 1973 that Sheila Wingfield was free to write openly. As a child she educated herself by secretly reading a literary classic each night and writing verses in the early morning, and during her marriage she wrote her poetry between 3am and 7am. She inherited and renovated two large houses in Ireland, and wrote three volumes of memoirs and seven books of poetry.