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View From
Crook Peak
By Richard Lawson
Below us
now, the levels
where
Monmouth fought, and
Jefferies
sat on stinging haemorrhoids
while
sending farm boys to the rope.
Down to
your left
the Vale of
Avalon
peppered
with hills that play at dinosaurs:
that wood
smoke laced with mist
is drifting
on towards the Tor
the breast
there raised up to the broad white sky
where
Michael plays the piper once a year.
This ridge
was once a mountain range
that’s
vanished now into thin air.
Its glacial
run off cut a sickening groove
into the
limestone slabs
the Gorge,
still wild
throws
rocks at alien lice
that crawl
along its bed
sweeping on
down
the Mendips
lift the air
sweet
rising air that gives the gift of flight.
Back over,
that was Quincey’s place
where he
and Coleridge and their gang
would
reason stonedly about their world and words
And to the
north
the air
path followed once when
cloud lift
shrank this hill for me
down to a
map.
Dizzy with
height
the great
wing banked
and bucked
its way downwind to home
aimed for
the cricket square
but landed
thankfully
on soft
green grass at Honey Hall.
North west,
the Severn
gives a
brave, dull gleam
under the
mountains and the clouds of Wales
there’s
Woodspring Priory
where you
can feel the love
good monks
gave to the ground.
It’s
desecrated now
home to the
current cult of death.
This ridge
we’re on
leads to
the sea
to Brean
Down’s tip
where
riptides make the waters mad
waves dance
on their hind legs like circus dogs
while on
the Point
there’s
ancient toilet blocks
where
soldiers shat their youth away
waiting to
bombard Boney’s fleet
that never
came.
Over the
Bay, those are the Quantock hills
home of the
man who ruined Xanadu
under their
shadow lies
the block
of Hinkley
humming
with power
heat for
the many
slow death
for the few
We brought
a Slovak up here once
to see the
view. He wept.
- Nowhere
untouched by man, he said.
I sort of
like it here. It’s home.
* * *
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posted 7 July 2006 |
