The River Walk

Silent water slips away to sea,
Kissed by trout and dappled with evening light.
The gilded sun melts in purple shadows
Over the blue powdered hills.

There are days here.
Days moving round
The oakleaf stone,
The delta,
The forgotten ford.

Days......

When the river rose and filled the furrows with san
When we found the enormous caterpillar on the dead tree
When we sang Wade In The Water though none of us did
When we faked the ritual of slipping through the leaf
When we cobbled sculptures of winter stone
When we found the big tree torn out like a tooth
When Paul, Rosie and Titus swam in the cool water
and found 100 mussels.

When we found treasure and garlic
And sang songs all the way home.

The Market Cross

This is a place of words:
Words which accompanied the Celtic dead to rest,
Words that told how King Eadred of the English
Had burned Ripon to insult this kingdom,
Words of royal charters and plain dealing.

When maps were made by markets
The cross was made.
Four solid steps surmounted by a shaft, 
And, until Cromwell’s days, by a cross.

Here was the royal signature of control.
When William the Bastard’s soldiers
Laid Masham waste
Here is where someone told the survivors:
This is the way things are.

Now the monastic flocks are memories
And the court which pilloried criminals here
Is just a house in College Lane,
And Mr. Tenpercent-Vicar
No longer collects his tithes on this spot,
It is still the centre of our little universe,
The hub of the holy fair.

The School

From outside 
It looks old,
Unchanged for two hundred years.
Mrs. Danby’s endowed school.

But inside
The fastest metabolism in town
Boils and swirls
And kicks its feet
And roars around the playground.

This is the cutting edge of time
Where people grow faster than bamboo
And the work goes on forever:
Stoking hearts and heads
With the nutty slack of knowledge.

But nothing lasts forever
And when the screws shake the chalky dandruff
From their fingers
And climb the winding stairs for tea,
The old lags kick, slide and laggy in the yard
And raw life echoes off the workhouse wall.

Voices in the King’s Head

In the Friday night clamour of smoke and ale froth
We gather to dispense
With the language of the English,
And round the table cut the bandsaw rhythm of
Norwegian Geordie, Smuggled Cornish,
And the taste of tin on the tonsils
As the flat Barnsley vowels
Slap and slide.
In the corner,
Black as the Pentlands in December,
The lowland treacle mixes with
The curling stone consonants of the Cheviots
And runs aground on the barnacled
Inflections of Grimsby.

But this is how its always been.

Once it was monks and drovers,
Chapmen, tenters and tinkers.
Now its reps, keepers and software analysts
Who are making sure
We are a nation at war with the common enemy
Of the Queen’s English.

Outside My Front Door

Outside my front door 
The dust hangs in the air of a thousand sheep sales.

Monks and a king’s company
Pass up the road from the river
And a file of Roman’s march across their path.

From the river the sound of baptisms echoes in the stone
Before the making and breaking of the church.

The dead are everywhere:
Under grass and under stone,
Under streets and on Gregory Hill,
Carried down from Colsterdale
And back from wars.

The square flows with tides of
William the Bastard’s army,
The Masham Volounteers,
Maypole dancers, mummers, 
The church orchestra,
Nuns off to Gun Bank
And out of the square go
Sheep. kings, monks, sheep,
Stage coaches, carriers, soldiers,
Sheep, tractors and drays.

But sometimes there’s just the swifts and the shadows,
The cross, the trees and the cats
Outside my front door.

Gregory Hill

In the wind that slides over the ocean slopes of Cat Gill
And falls like water through Warthermarske at dusk
There is no news but old news,
And the old roads are empty but for keepers and grockles.

In the bird call that echoes over Roomer
Comes no echo of Roman sandals
And the Celts who farmed above Nutwith
Are long gone.

But on this hill
Where Charlie the old horse pulls at the winter grass
And looks down the long furrows
That stream away through the field to the river’s meeting
I can touch fingers with the last of the kings of this little country
And be the watch tower.

Coming Home By Station Bank

There’s a sun swept low on a mad march wind
Silvering streamered clouds
Sliding cutlass lights through the heather smoke
Feathering from the fells.
There’s a distant bird like a storm tossed coin
High on the hammering wind
Far away and long above
The town in the valley mist.

And I always travel this mile so slowly
Savouring every yard,
Cresting the ridge of the edge of the world
Coming home again,
Coming home.

After The Steam Rally
After the taste of tar on the tongue,
Of hay seeds, dust upon grass blades
And the clank and cough of mechanical lungs
The market place cools as evening stretches
Its fingers into the open hand
Of the short summer night.

Sitting on the cross
Under the swift vaulted sky,
Half empty glasses in our hands,
We consider the reptilian grooves and swirls
That pattern with mute archaeology
The bedrock of the square,
And the primeval ooze of engine oil
That glistens in the first lit lamps.

And I think:
It is wonderful to live in a town that people are always
Coming to,
Having lived in a town that people couldn’t wait to leave.

The Feast of the Returning Sun
Every January I tread the churchyard path.
To me it is the curving henge bank
Centred on the stone
Before the Christians came
And covered it with psalms.

Did they instal a new priest or convert the old?
Did they nail the old rite with the malleting cross
Or sweeten Yule with Christ’s birth?

Now there are
No more bale fires
No more hunted wrens
Though still there is the slaughtered man,
And the pagan lights break out here every year.

It takes more than a new god
To stop snowdrops
Hammering through frozen soil
To the returning sun.

The Duck Race

Like a clock spring driven one one
Gigantic annual tick
The big hand of duck race
Sweeps aside the dead years.

TICK : a baby in my arms
TICK : a boy in frog-faced wellies
TICKTICKTICK

And suddenly it is my youngest child’s
Last year in the water,
Thrashing after yellow plastic demons.
Brief as a may fly,
Her duty will soon be done.

Next year she will be
Looking through invisible bars
At the ones who are still doing time
And then she will hear the


TICKTICKTICKTICK


The Snow

It was late on a Friday, early December,
The heavens ash grey and the wind scarcely moving.
Snow simply fell as though
Someone had switched on the sky
And left it to empty the clouds.

Come Saturday morning the power was off,
The phone dead, the air still as the ice in the lane.
We ploughed the snow deserts like huskies
And snowballs and laughter flew round us in swarms.
In the field by the church we set reaping
The harvest of crystals until the red sun
Sailed away to the west

I came on the photograph yesterday:
All of us standing as proudly as Inuits,
Only lacking the backdrop of walrus or polar bear,
Next to a small leaning igloo 

The Wishing Seat

Whenever I’m here I’m never alone,
There’s always you and me.
Whenever I’m here I feel at home
On the old tree’s bones
Where the sunshine’s warm
And the wind sighs and sings and moans
Like a ship on the southern seas.

Whenever I’m here its a lovely day
Under winter or summer skies
And in times to come when you’re far away
I’ll be leaning back on the bark of grey
And feeling inside the warm sun’s rays
And looking out of your eyes.

Whenever I’m here and the touch of gold
Is frosting the winter breeze
I will always find your hands to hold
For wherever we are we are touching souls

Forever

For in my wishes are folded
Your words by the wishing tree.