White Peak Poems

Here are the five poems I wrote whilst in the Southern Peak District last week:

September 6^th, 2011

badger/angel

for DOLLYman

he thuds into the earth,

great white beast,

shedding ashen feathers all over the road

something savage

has sought out his heart

(sensing its extraordinary sweetness)

death has already spread her cape

over his back and begun to work him,

licking his ears with a coal-wet tongue

hours later, he’s nothing

but ink and oil, and dank night pool;

nothing but the road

September 6^th, 2011

September Heron (First Day Back At School)

A heron smartly rises from the brook:

one sheet of 100mg A3 ivory paper, cut

with a craft knife and crisply folded

at acute angles, given a deft stroke

of charcoal and hung over a yellow compass;

it rises, and it soars.

September 7^th, 2011

Under hawthorn and hazels

which hand the rain down

leaf to leaf, drop by drop,

we wait by the weir, daughter

and mother, easily talking;

the sound of the rain

and the sound of the weir.

September 8^th, 2011

The Roaches

I

The peregrine falcon hangs on the wind

above rocks the colour of ravens.

She turns, and the weather turns

with her wing-tip flash: the tarn flares

and walkers become bright as gorse flowers;

the fawn and violet of early heather

find their way into the pine trunks

and mushrooms like golden eggs are found in the grass.

Then back they come, the clouds as dark as bogs,

seeping into the grass; pine-barks gloss over

and the truths of heather’s bruises surface;

walkers run for cover, the tarn turns

its shutters, and the falcon soaks up the dark

of the raven-rocks in her far-spread wings.

II

A laugh on the wind

is snatched by a crow;

the crow’s throat-rattle

shivers through the pines;

the pines’ needle-shimmy

is rallied by chiff-chaffs,

hidden in the scrub

by the trail that we wind up,

talking, and laughing.