Letter From Cumbria
"We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun, it smites us into darkness."
--Milton
The sky has dropped. I guess you know.
White dust scatters on forest pine.
A brilliant sunlight scalds the snow.
Will there be loud arcades of time,
Flowers to erupt their wild grace,
Histories for us? You are mine.
I am yours. I know your face,
Your hands, our children's blue eyes…
You not here, I whisper into space.
And daffadillies, Coleridge sighs,
Growing quickly beside the lake,
Leaping from the mirroring skies -
daffadillies melt and shake,
vibrating in the molten air.
Where poets cherished all they make,
these makers witness out despair,
ghosts waiting for the sun to slow.
Alone, I wonder where you are.
The sky has dropped. I guess you know,
White dust scatters on forest pine.
A brilliant sunlight scalds the snow.
Jubilee
(For my mother)
Jolf Moore showed you how to cut jubilee,
damming the stream from Tinsley Colliery
where the coal dust was washed off coal,
pumped out onto scrubby, derelict land,
A layer of coal dust blocked the stream,
wet and compressed like freshly cut coal.
He said these black cubes were jubilee,
though nobody'd ever told him why.
He tried to hold your hand. Bought you flowers.
Trudged from the waste land with a barrow
made of packing cases, shoes tied up
with strings from his mother's aprons.
Stacked under their kitchen sink to dry,
the cubes whispered like roots of trees,
a singing forest washed from a cold
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