Elmet Book

The upturned face of this land
The mad singing of the hills
The prophetic mouth of the rain

That fell asleep

Under migraine of headscarves the clatter
Of clog-irons and looms
And gutter-water and clog-irons
And clog-irons and biblical texts

Stretchs awake, out of Revelations
And returns itself.

Chapels, chimneys, vanish in the brightening

And the hills walk out on the hills
The rain talks to its gods
The light, opening younger, fresher wings
Holds this land up again like an offering

Heavy with the dream of a people.
- The Trance of Light, pg. 7
* * *

It set out -
Spleandour bursts against its brow
Broke over its shoulders.
The hills heeled, meeting the blast of space.

The stone rigging was strong.
Exhilarated men
Cupped hands and shouted to each other
And grew stronger riding the first winters.

The great adventure had begun -
Even the grass
Agreed and came with them,
And crops and cattle -

No survivors.
Here is the hulk, every rib shattered.

A few crazed sheep
Pulling its weeds
On a shore of cloud.
- Hill Walls, pg. 12
* * *

Death-struggle of the glacier
Enlarged the long gullet of Calder
Down which its corpse vanished.

Farms came, stony masticators
Of generations that ate each other
To nothing inside them.

The sunk mill-towns were cemeteries
Digesting utterly
All with whom they swelled.

Now, coil behind coil,
A wind-parched ache,
An absence, famished and staring,
Admits tourists

To pick among crumbling, loose molars
And empty sockets.
- Remains of Elmet, pg. 23
* * *

- a frost-frail

Amethyst.

An iron earth sinking,
Frozen in its wounds.

A snipe
Knowing it has to move fast
Hurtles upwards and downwards

Drumming in the high dark - witchdoctor

Climbing and diving

Drawing the new
Needle of moon
Down

Gently

Into its eggs.
- Spring-Dusk, pg. 34
* * *

Dripped a chill virulence
Into my nape -
Rubberised prison-wear of suppression!

Guarding and guarded by
The Council's black
Forbidding forbidden stones.

The policeman's protected leaf!

Detestable evergreen sterility!
Over dead acid gardens
Where blue windows, shrined in Sunday, shrank

To arthritic clockwork,
Yapped like terriers and shook sticks from doorways
Vast and black and proper as museums.

Cenotaphs and the moor-silence!
Rhododendrons and rain!
It is all one. It is over.

Evergloom of official tittivation -
Uniform at the reservoir, and the chapel,
And the graveyard park,

Ugly as a brass-band in India.
- Rhododendrons, pg. 47
* * *

Infatuated stones.

Hills seeming to strain
And cry out
In labour.

Three weird sisters.

Imbecile silence
Of a stone god
Cut into gravestones.

The brother
Who tasted the cauldron of thunder
Electrocuted.

A house
Emptied and scarred black.

In a land
Emptied and scarred black.
- Haworth Parsonage, pg. 54
* * *

Wind slams across the tops
The spray cuts upward.

You claw your way
Over a giant beating wing.

And Thomas and Walter and Edith
Are living fathers

Esther and Sylvia
Living feathers

Where all the horizons lift wings
A family of dark swans

And go beating low through storm-silver
Toward the Atlantic.
- Heptonstall Cemetery, pg. 66