Migration

     For Samuel Richardson, 1856-1897

What damp day was it that drove you out of
Randalstown? What ground out your dream to
fly south, as far down the world as it's
possible to go without eating ice?
Who suggested that there was a place
no short sight could see, sewn into blue seas?
Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud,
beckoned you to her, young and filled with hope
of green land, swapping colonies to see
if England's hard hand would hound you there.

Perhaps that wasn't part of your thinking,
just a romantic connection I've made
to lionise you, lying in my heart
like a slow pulse searching for rootedness.
Maybe you were brash, basking in the
whole planet. You put it in your pocket
and went, surely walking, not sailing the seas.
Fair weather or foul were all one to you
who wound fate around your finger
pointing down a hundred years to me.

Heat pours from your grave high on Wyndham Hill,
migrating north until I feel you in
the rising sun riding the stage out
to Fortrose, carrying people and post.
Smell the southern winds, they are full of you
wrestling the reins along metal roads,
steaming, like your nags, with correspondence.
Your genes have carried to me more news.
It tells me that I'm older than you now.
What great-grandad could die aged forty one

and leave me here to reinvoke you straddling
the wide world of your dream rich heart?
I hear you singing songs guiding me home
through dead years keeping us apart
and strangers still. I shall return to Randalstown
to disinter what made you tread round half
a globe to gallop horses on Southland's plains.
I'll dig up your dreams and let them fly again
to far lands under mute arrangements of stars.
I shall still your ghost by grappling with it.

Reservoirs

These reservoirs
                 were built to keep things in,
water, fish,
             assorted water-weed.
Canada geese
             skim the surface light,
homing in
          to where they now belong.


Long ago
         they gave up on the tundra
and now see here
                 as their only home,
as though they've somehow
                          lost their inner maps,
now only need
              the atlas of these hills.


They were made
                     in the days when mills
were filled with workers
                         coming to the towns
of Lancashire
              to work the cotton trade.


The rainfall that
                  cascaded from the land
was captured here,
                   where the farms were drowned
in these great pits,
                     to quench that mighty thirst.


Their names are taken
                      from those ghostly farms,
Ogden, Kitcliffe,
                  Piethorne, Norman Hill,
Hanging Lees
             and Rooden; six in all.


These days we often
                    walk up through the hills,
the Pennines here
                  loom above our house.
The days of rain
                 are plentiful for sure
and water's still 
                  collecting in the ponds.


We fish and tell
                 the children to beware
of cold deep currents
                      pulsing through each sluice
connecting name 
                with name, each stepping down
from these heights
                   to the towns below;
Oldham, Rochdale,
                  Newhey and Milnrow.


These reservoirs
                 hold something more as well;
tales of how
             we colonise the land
As if we 
                       

Masks

Masked up, we get out on the street,
incognito robber, anarchist,
unidentifiable by friends,
clues of facial recognition gone.
Wiped away, the half ironic smile,
the pursed lips of dubiety,
lipstick red and smeared behind the cloth.

We're beating back invisibility,
microbes part suspended in the air;
collapsing lungs, organs closing down
indicate that time is running out.
We're hiding from ourselves what this means,
the hourglass is quickly emptying
and there's no hand to turn it up again.

Winter at Swanwick Station

A January frost glistens under the station
lights as the early shift, shuffling their feet,
test for footholds, find the slipping points,
ponder whether to apply winter precautions.
The 5.32 rounds the down bend
splashing ice sparks. A thunder flash arcs
an electric glare that grazes retinas,
illuminates in blue the pre-dawn morning.
Ice is falling from the stars and the globular moon,
setting over the station, is a frost machine.
But now it is spreading time, casting salt
as a sower casts seeds, as if there were fields
to fertilise and not these dark stones
petrified by January frost.

Namesakes

The men that I am named from are both dead.
Strange how they were somehow half my age,
lithe with life and full of dreams ahead;

that they were unfulfilled on rugby fields,
yearned for subtle conversations
overflowing with their ideals.

They volunteered and boarded ships
that took their guileless notions
out to dangerous sands where lips

chafed in winds the guns unleashed.
And they were held accountable, sage
beyond the years their deaths released.

So they aged but wisdom came too late,
mannered in a cold machine gun's strafe,
a landmine's swift and cruel fate

with all their good intentions left unsaid.
My father's always questioned why he's safe
when the men that I am named from are both dead.

In the Garden and the Kitchen

I see you, fingers dug in soil,
kneeling down, close to the earth.
Starlings startle you in the trees,
You look up quickly, hair strands flying around your face,
sunlight striking over your cheeks,
striding down the seedling line
where peas shouldering through sample it.
You crouch again and feel the dampness on your knees.

You stand silent in the kitchen
pulling off your earthy boots,
one leg braced against a chair.
The evening sun is slanting through the open door
polishing pots on the sills,
tiny dust specks glinting, shining in your hair.

Get out the OS one inch scale
No.58, if that's the one
we made most progress on

last time we lacked direction.
Spread it on the floor,
I'll clear up the cups,

the pepper vodka,
the remains of the sweet and sour
we had last night or the night before.

How is it that the place
you want is always on
the edge of adjacent maps,

one of which you haven't got,
the other in need of refolding
so paths are easier to spot?

And wrestling the thing to see
what PH means becomes
a manoeuvre of unique agility.

There are places here you'd never
think you'd see. A pub where
last orders were called last year,

a stream sewn with trout,
a church inside of which
a women kneels devout,

for all we know not one thing of her
or why she prays in this church
with spire, by a coffee stain.

And so, to get our bearings,
once we place the compass
like yarrow stalks thrown randomly,

the needle's a blur of magnetic rain
pointing out our new direction;
somewhere north-west of lost.

Prospects

There isn't much that can be said
now he's finished, over, dead.

Perhaps a flimsy paragraph
is fitting as an epitaph,

a word or two beside the grave,
mutterings of being brave

to children as they clutch a flower.
It's complete in half an hour.

We walk away for cakes and tea,
remembrances, sympathy,

anecdotes about the way
he was before the thudding clay

reclaimed the hair, the bone, the skin
he kept his understanding in.

Now every time we think about
the silenced laughter leaking out

to fertilise the wormy soil
he's laid in, so our senses coil

with knowing where he's gone so we
will go, finished, over, free.

Peter's Saxophone

When you retired you took up the saxophone
And blew it in a slow, warm-hearted way
That made me wish I too could learn to play
With your quirky, off-beat, kind, melodious tone.
I'll miss the chats we'll now no longer have
Of football, friends, politics, Palestine,
How I'd laugh at your observations,
The way you'd giggle quietly at mine,
With a beer or two to guide our conversations.
I loved you for the way you made your own
Your wry, unassuming attitude,
How you were for the many, not the few.
Now you've died, I'll take up the saxophone
And blow it slow, in remembrance of you.