Looking Back

I walk the countryside, its woods and ways

Armed with a little knowledge

Amidst a litter of ignorance

The black-arrow blackbird

Fletches across the path, its

Yellow beacon-bill, a sharp contrast

To the dark leafy way

I climb over elms leveled by the windage

Of thirty-some rook’s nests

Into the graveyard

Where only the ash trees rise and

Grey headstones reel crazily

Over a sea of sunken bones

Deer prints in Viner’s mud, down Old Denaby

What looks like otter’s, too

Cormorants gargoyle me

From flooded fence-posts

Strangers to my youth

Under one of the greatest viaducts in Britain

Long unused by the steam-trains hauling limestone

From the shining quarry

I find the blue bricks aerosoled art

Unsigned archways highlighted by

Slanting sunlight in a striking

Shock of the new that stuns me

Beneath the central span, the sinuous Don

Quietly winds through a Sylvanian landscape

Beckoning me homeward to its sweetened waters

Encroaching willows whisper the promise

"We’re not drinking the poison you knew,

The foul sewer your mother feared, come be

Baptised a South-Yorkshireman again”

It’s so appealing this quixotic Don silting at the feet

Of old steel mills and mine-workings re-forged to

Retail worlds and sports centres

And then there’s its sibling Dearne reborn into

A trout-stream, industrial muck forgotten

De-toxed, its bastard birth abandoned

A sudden wind riffles my notebook thumbing the

Poetry over to the fright of a blank page

I drop it carelessly onto the wet earth

Where its leaves are dampened like enthusiasm

This in the lover’s grove where

Couples used to lie on beds of shiny

Mermaid’s hair grass

Those secret hollows are gone, instead

Dirt tracks scar, tooled by swarms of

Mini-motorbikes

The once emerald green

Burned like tide-stranded

Kelp, on an unloved shore

Now pods of flesh-pierced adolescents squat

Licking spliff papers, swearing with every

Ungrammatical sentence

And this corner of my youth where old men used

To deg* on young love is now a desecrated temple.

 

© Mike Laycock (Silversalt)

 

Top left is the local flix where I had my first date at 8yrs old with Janet a stunning blond. I remember giving her chocolate cigarettes. Didn't enjoy much of the film, just lots of chocolatey kisses. The rock formation, we used as a stone slide, having to employ greaseproof bread-paper between trousers and limestone to achieve any kind of velocity ! The pit-wheel is the one that used to lower me into the coal seams of South Yorkshire.

* spy

Done