Whitby
St Hilda’s Priory
Six no seven tractors, and two shire horses
that trudge over, mistaking me.
A polytunnel, a nuns’ cats’ cemetery,
and far on the hill above the Esk
the Abbey, with the famous steps
up to St Mary’s, counting all the way.
Caedmon’s there if you think that way
mucking out in a snowbound winter
and dreaming the first poem.
*
St Mary’s Churchyard
Another time a nice American
asked which was Dracula’s grave.
I said I didn’t know but told my friends
I showed him a sepulchre, washed
blank among the leaning stones.
And when all’s said no less real
than the Venerable Bede
or for that matter these bare trees,
ruined choirs of a seminar
where late the sweet birds sang,
in one ear and out the other.
*
Sonnet 73
I can sit on a bench by this
stained glass window
as the boy I was one afternoon
when the lights came on
in a tutor’s room in the Poly.
I loved that place.
That was me, whose brother
never learned to read.
We bowed our heads
in the long black window
to our books. And today that time
of year thou may’st in me behold
on this bench with my brother
in my head whom I never
taught to read dead a dozen years,
and the poem I still know
still there too. I say it under
my breath, who knows why.