The sea must whisper, hiss or roar. It strews the sand with hollow bones. It nudges cliffs, invades the shore and swallows homes. The waters pulse like rolling wheels on yellow fish that gleam as brass. Black flowers by the broken creels are dripping glass. In mist the gulls shrill, mew and taunt […]
PNSummer2013
Comparisons
You shocked me, at first. Stone soot-black, still to be sand-blasted back, with your red-brick back-to-backs, outside lavs, washing strung out across the streets of Leeds. Our own terraces looped along each valley, linking towns and names – Wattstown, Tylerstown, Tonyrefail. But not on this scale. More people within forty miles than half […]
Dunbar Avian
how deary tea too loud cleary me you sou’ feary see you mou’ teary tae you please kittiwake wee wee wee breeze ticker tape tea tea tea wheesht trick of fate free free free wheeze bit o cake caw caw canny
Up North
We went to Huddersfield, a town of stone settled like a wasp-nest on the hills. Broad streets preened their glossy trees. The ring-road clambered up the hill’s backbone. We strode the empty streets, their pavements worn by wry-faced Yorkshiremen; admired the railway station, pillared like a palace; saw the George Hotel where Rugby League […]
Finding True North – Boxing the Compass
nirvana’s neighbour, withdrawn nervous: whereupon wanderlust-navigated, wings Westward (towards the sun, widdershins) wayfaring stranger, wretched star-crossed, wrenched soulless, wandering Southerly (with the wind soughing) sibilant, soul-searching emotion seeking eden’s enigmatic, sun-rinsed equinox East (mysterious, ancient, heathen) ethereal, not earthly nothingness emerging nearer, nearing empyrean Northwards … (higher as […]
Above the Washburn Valley
The heather is turning brown and the air is chill beneath low banks of threatening cloud. Mother made her last walk here, revisiting her girlhood, a few unsteady steps around the watershed of Wharfe and Washburn rivers, with the glint of Fewston down below, and green shoots of heather showing. Then father came […]