Any poets about or bored muses fancying a day out?
Rainy, windy, cold Leeds City Station
Half-way through its slow chaotic transformation
Contractors morning break, overalls, hard hats and harness
Flood McDonalds where I sip my tea and try to translate Val?ry.
London has everything except my bardic inspiration
Ive only to step off the coach in Leeds and it whistles
Its bravuras down every wind, rattles the cobbles in Kirkgate Market
Hovers in the drunken brogue of a Dubliner in the chippie
As we share our love of Joyce the Aire becomes the Liffey.
All my three muses have abandoned me. Daisy in Asia,
Brenda protesting outside the Royal Free, Barbara seeing clients at the C.A.B.
Past Saltaires Mill, the worlds eighth wonder,
The new electric train whisperglides on wet rails
Past Shipleys fairy glen and other tourist trails
Past Kirkstalls abandoned abbey and redundant forge
To Grandma Wilds in Keighley where I sit and gorge.
Ive travelled on the Haworth bus so often
The driver chats as if I were a local
But when the rainbows lightning flash
Illumines all the valleys theres a hush
And every pensioner's rheumy eye is rooted
On the gleaming horizon as its mooted
The Brontes spirits make the thunder crack
Three cloaked figures converging round the Oakworth track.
Haworth in a storm is a storm indeed
The lashing and the crashing makes the gravestones bleed
The mashing and the bashing makes the light recede
And on the moor top I lose my way and find it
Half a dozen times slipping in the mud and heather
Heather than can stand the thrust of any weather.
Just as suddenly as it had come the storm abated
Extremes demand those verbs so antiquated
Archaic and abhorred and second-rated
Yet still they stand like moorland rocks in mist
And wait as I do till the storm has passed
Buy postcards at the parsonage museum shop
Sit half an hour in the tea room drying off
And pen a word or two to my three muses
Who after all presented their excuses
But nonetheless the three all have their uses.
