Moor

Tussocks:

the moor’s repine, fields wide,

these sinewy growths

are cairns or markers,

but of what?

What can it mean

that they crowd to your feet,

these sudden tufts

of muted green,

these deep knots of anguish, trauma?

Is the grey sky above an answer,

or the tor ahead

with its granite crags, crabbed?

Or the stunted bushes

hunkered in the open?

II.

The trickle of a spring

gathers to a shaded pool,

then holds, mirror-still, then

falls.

With measured calm

it yearns for the body of the river,

girding my boot-soles,

offering its protest, its scant resistance.

Its lisps are the only sounds I hear,

I garner its mutterings and stoop to drink:

‘Live’, it says, ‘carry your colour of grief,

but live’.

POETRY