{"id":16811,"date":"2024-09-14T12:35:46","date_gmt":"2024-09-14T11:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=16811"},"modified":"2024-09-14T12:35:46","modified_gmt":"2024-09-14T11:35:46","slug":"holyhay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2024\/09\/14\/holyhay\/","title":{"rendered":"Poem: Holy Hay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Holy Hay<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t have a chance to show you<br \/>\nthe sainfoin I sowed back in May,<br \/>\nremembering our holiday in Spain<br \/>\nwhere we kept seeing it in bloom<br \/>\nby the road and on waste ground, covering<br \/>\nwhole hillsides, great cerise stains<br \/>\nof what we later learned was Holy Hay.<br \/>\nBack here I bought some and spread it, watching<br \/>\nas seedlings appeared, unfurled nodding leaflets<br \/>\nin the rough and roguing wind and rain.<br \/>\nMaybe it was the wet, or the rabbits;<br \/>\nwhatever, just one made it through to flower,<br \/>\nwhen each closed and softly bristled brush became<br \/>\na clump of rosy Jagger lips. Yet I remember<\/p>\n<p>wrongly: it wasn\u2019t Spain, it was Sicily,<br \/>\nand maybe what we saw was <em>Sulla<\/em>,<br \/>\nItalian sainfoin, a deeper red colour,<br \/>\nbut its name would never stick with me;<br \/>\nnot like Holy Hay, coumarin still drifting<br \/>\nfrom an early mowing, with vetch and clovers,<br \/>\nsweet vernal grass, sown by an unseen other<br \/>\nwho disappeared with the passing spring.<br \/>\nThat\u2019s why I tried it in our garden,<br \/>\nfeeling it somehow sacred, so it might recover<br \/>\nthe past; seeing it there you would laugh and<br \/>\nI would find in that perennial trait<br \/>\npassed down from your dear, faithful father<br \/>\na way back to those fertile fields of grace.<\/p>\n<p><em><span class=\"mw-mmv-title\"><strong>Feature Image: Flowers of<\/strong> Hedysarum coronarium at the <a class=\"new\" title=\"Jardin des Plantes (page does not exist)\" href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?title=Jardin_des_Plantes&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1\">Jardin des Plantes<\/a>, Paris<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Holy Hay I didn\u2019t have a chance to show you the sainfoin I sowed back in May, remembering our holiday in Spain where we kept seeing it in bloom by the road and on waste ground, covering whole hillsides, great cerise stains of what we later learned was Holy Hay. Back here I bought some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":236,"featured_media":16812,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[1449,3570,3573,4020,4133,4134,6581,6595,7320,7341,7348],"class_list":["post-16811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-cassandra-voices-poetry","tag-gardeing-poety","tag-gardener-poet","tag-hay","tag-holy","tag-holy-hay-poem","tag-nicholas-battey","tag-nicholas-battey-poetry","tag-poem","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-and-gardening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/236"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}