About Rivers

A path to walk along with friends, a lover's map,
where windows tell the story of settlement and towns.

How the surface repeats, water, light, stone, water,
light, stone: silence broken only by the running of the stream.

A place to be apart, stepping-stones, ankle height,
swallow path, bonfires, dragonflies, a salvage of dreams.

A quicksilver ribbon where trees keep a memory
of summer, answering to nothing except the shade.

The old gods remaining in the sediment of glass bottles,
coins thrown in for luck, plastic horses lost to the stream.

The language of owls, the wing beat of bats, night flight,
the sound of oars in the distance, as a boat pulls away.

How easily the world turns upside down, the moon
at the bottom, lamps shining amongst stars in a hall of mirrors.

Earth returned its most necessary element,
a country of fish, tree root, branch and reed.

A weather station of each season, warning
with the cracked sand of the dried bed in summer.

A clock of the transient world, where fishermen
and boys wait for miracles, and the current gives up-

lost keys, cups and spoons, floating boxes, and the dead.
Weeds and rusts them, closes over, washes them away.

An old pilgrim route, a place to drink, swim in black water,
cross between cities, over cow parsley meadows.

A natural meeting point for rain, leaves and petals,
give and take, a wreath of flowers, how much is passing.

A place to sing to yourself, empty buckets, watch geese
lean from bridges, see how the flood, rises, falls, returns.

Northerners

We have sewn into our pockets a memory
of moors and marsh, cathedrals of space,
crab towns where stone quays push black water
back and the distance is pin cushioned with lights.
Our history a miner's helmet, echo and reply
on mountains, the wild view in the mirror,
warehouses turned to gallery space, Blackpool
in holiday week, iron bridges and brass bands.

Our voices burr, with Anglo Saxon vowels,
imprinted so long ago, they remain embedded,
like diamante studs, hoop earrings, the glamour
of hair dyed blonde, dreadlocks, the jostle
of pubs selling cheap meals for two where
men off night shift blink above pints. Or kindly
as carpenter's wood, railway guards calling
'Good-bye Love' when the train is pulling for home.

We know geology and winter gardens, variety
and mosques. The smell of smoke, yards after rain,
that half- moons cobbles, turning them to silver.
The silence you can hear at night outside solitary
farms. Some of our novelists wrote in a tiny hand
in miniature books. Our grandparents worked at
the furnace and the loom spinning steel
and cotton for bread.

When we meet we may talk of hoolies and weather.
Speak the memory of coastal places, so remote they
have forgotten their names. Resorts with rusting
piers where we have been blown inward.
But for twenty pence in the telescope below
the spangled coloured lights, beyond the shipping
lanes there are white horses and new harbours,
a stretching coast, a different view.

Hoolies: Knees up.