Averil Stedeford

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Song Of The Wind Farms

Slender turbines turning in the sun harvest kilowatts on Cornish farms. If you listen you might hear them hum. They catch the offshore wind. Built upon a harbour wall, where weather’s never calm, slender turbines turn in the sun. Toiling slaves, they sing a working song, their noses to the wind that twists their arms. If you listen you might hear them hum. When on the horizon they are strung they give the distant view a moving charm, slender turbines turning in the sun look magical, but their best work is done in weather that makes watchers hurry home. If you listen you might hear them hum an emerald song of better things to come, of power generated without harm as slender turbines turn in the sun. If you listen you might hear them hum.

Averil Stedeford

This villanelle was written in 1999 as an exercise when I was a member of Olivia Byard’s poetry class run by the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education.

In 2000 I read in the local paper of a proposal to create a wind farm near Swindon, on a farm owned by Mr Adam Twine. Wondering whether farmers like poetry, I took a chance and sent it to him. I received an enthusiastic reply and henceforth followed the project in the press. There was considerable local opposition.

A year or two later, at the AGM of the local cooperative society, I noticed a very smart woman with a little silver wind turbine in her lapel. Greeting her, I told her about my poem. “Oh! you wrote it!” she said. She had heard it read by a supporter at a public meeting held to consider the planning application and remembered it well!

Averil Stedeford