Pull the ragwort
Get the roots out
Never let them lie
They will pay you
Twelve a penny
Lest the cattle die
© Janet Sutherland
Picture 10041033, illustration by Mabel E Step, Wayside and Woodland Blossoms, circa 1909, image copyright Mary Evans
Janet Sutherland was born in Wiltshire and grew up on a dairy farm. She has written three books of poetry, most recently Bone Monkey (Shearsman, 2014) and is working on her fourth. Her poems are widely anthologised and recent poems have appeared in the New Statesman and The Spectator. She won the 2017 Kent and Sussex Poetry Prize and received a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2018. Her essay ‘Reznikoff and his Sources’ appeared as an afterword to the Black Sparrow (US) and Five Leaves (UK) editions of Reznikoff’s Holocaust. A founder member of Needlewriters writers’ cooperative, she lives in Lewes, East Sussex.