Summer on The Firth is piercingly beautiful,
A pang of pink cherry blossom blesses my eye,
Shadows of Hawthorn silent and still, line the bridge,
Sentinels scorched in stone by a benign Hiroshima.

I try just to be, to let it sink in that I
Am this! The sun has risen high above the ridge,
Embsay Crag, a brooding hag with a crooked nose,
Upon which sits a hairy wart, a scrawny tree.

I squint to the West, see Sharpaw’s breast and curved
Volcanic arms, ten thousand years she’s been exposed,
Right now she is clothed in ferns and shoots of bracken,
I know her of old, the cool springs of her bleak pasture

Right here’s a rapture of thick silence, cracked echoes,
Shreiks and laughter from the infant school,
The bird calls drifting down the breeze off the moor,
El wood huddled above the dead eyes of Jenny Ghyll.

A muffled engine throbs afoot the big hill,
Lazy in its graceful sweep to the valley floor,
The Reformist chapel and the weaving mill,
Victorian charms, small and on a human scale.

As all too human I descend the holy vale,
Firth means sanctuary, a place of refuge,
Surviving industry, terraces, estates,
Sharing it’s secret with the sacred landscape.

A simple green oasis in the middle,
A primeval hunk of clay that once dropped down,
And caused a town of concentric circles,
Always connected to this magical tumulus.