Another part of his childhood

To speak of the north

of my own life is bleak,

is to say I have

already said it.

I ran with the Swale,

clear mountain river,

around me, learned

in its stones. I was

its listener, that country

of turf and hill

falling into the cut

but oh slowly.

A hard grind, the soil

held back, the wheat

lay thin by the river,

storms raked the moor.

Abandoned farms, pit-shafts,

abbeys, monks’ Latin

gravestones, the pines

reared in the drizzle.

In ’47 shut in

with dead sheep the 4 month

snowfall pinned us.

Askrigg, Marske, the high

perched villages

of the Vikings

looked down on us.

My father, a small

gentle man I had seen

weep for a dead dog,

took a shotgun,

chased my uncle over the moor.

It was a life bound

to the land, to silence

of another kind, it was

the other place.

For the last time

I turn from it, I

set my face. It is

wherever I look,

shapes my life took:

the blown hill, the sun

close on the mountain,

the yellow weeds waving.