The wide front door flung open; mornings
of nearly midsummer at the Parsonage.
Carpentries of step and fence lead to the road,
two sisters talk inside amid smell of wood.
How cool in the showery after-light, the birch
slender, white, on the right, ash to the left.
Trunk and leaf shimmer and shine.
Beyond, those shaggy grain poles, the olden way,
are farmers’ fields, and slap of water in the fjord.
Stuff of memory; as it was just when
the girls said ‘let’s go’, stopped watching,
stood up long- skirted, put on straw hats,
walked to the family table in the trees.
Out there earth is drying, soil whispering ,
the Jolster sun glowing warm and lusty
in the moist open greenness of things.
Rain moves on. Another valley waits.
Beyond the open door, like love’s theatre
the curtain’s up; the fjell garden burgeons,
spills seasonal fruit and flower. Not wholly
real, not quite as is (it’s never so with Nikolai).
No limit to maybe, the fabled never-never,
or what might be, in the long lost domain
of days past, when all about were children
picking red-stemmed rhubarb, by the copse
of foxgloves, their speckled trumpets try
each year, first to amaze, then scale the sky.
_ _ _
I have long had an affection for the Nordic landscape, -endless forests, emptiness, mountains, small villages, wooden houses, the ping of ice as it cracks on lakes in Spring, and the pagan undertones. All this I found in Astrup, a revelation in his rural scenes, and bold colours with more than a touch of magic.
My poems have been published in poetry magazines and on websites. I have collected and edited several specialist anthologies of verse including ‘On A Bats Wing’, poems about bats, and ‘The Cockermouth Poets 1700-2012’, celebrating over 300 years of writing in and about the town. I also initiated the Cumbrian Literature Festival “Words By The Water’ now in its 14th year.
