Staked

Bradfield wood, eight hundred years of coppicing, mud and tyre tracks, spring spilling over the footprint-edges, wild strawberries and garlic, blackthorn exploded snow, coal tit, shy woodland robins fleet into the undergrowth, oak and birch, great and blue tits cosseted by long winter ash-and-hazel silence shouting grumpily from everywhere-eyeshot,  two voles I don't see, a dog. Another dog, a man in a green fleece, stacks of fireword, pea-sticks, wattle-and-daub sticks, hedge-stakes neatly pointed like so many oversize Buffy props, humming with massed-wood magicks, the bare ash overhead rattle together. Like rigging, says Pluvialis. The good ship, nuthatch piping from the tops'l.