Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
Your Cathedral
I remember the first time you brought me here:
your roofless cathedral you called it,
showed me the way samphire gets washed in gold when
the sun falls over the mudflats of Morecambe Bay,
Lakeland mountains bruised violet by the sky they touch,
charcoal smudges across the water, huddled in evening haze.
Blind to the noise of the town, the Friday night bars and boy racers,
this side of the sea wall is where you felt sense was stranded.
Low tide has left boats looking awkward, like forgotten orphans, while
black and white rows of oystercatchers push bright orange beaks into brine.
Cocooned in its own stillness a heron stands hunched, and beyond,
the bubbling call of a curlew, tragic as opera, unanswered.
You waited for the liminal moments: where the edges of day and night bleed —
for the slightest time barely one or the other, an in-between world
through which half-light was sifted, fleeting as life — and death.
For you some meaning in the feel of time’s pulse; a faith of sorts.
You saw the lie of the linear the world has fallen for;
heard the tide tell a different story.
Fell Ponies
It’s as if they have always been here,
hewn from the rock they rise from,
heads bowed in some earnest prayer,
silhouetted hulks of gathered silence.
Rain slants sideways from Skiddaw
glossing wet flanks black;
sunlight sheening them briefly,
before clouds regroup, break again.
Watching through tangled manes
flecked gold with bits of bracken
coal-dark eyes catch mine, pull me in
to the edges of their gentler world.
Ears tilt towards western fells where
the last of the light still lingers.
Is it the ghosts of the gone-before
they wait for? Nostrils scenting a wind
that shapes the hunchbacked hawthorns,
its horse-musk smell and sweet, warm breath,
the hoof-print history it might carry:
equine echoes of Viking, Roman, Celt.
Horses free to roam more distant hills,
run wild, unbridled and unbroken,
yet held within this boundless landscape;
tied by memory, tethered by kin.
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Shaun Barr is a poet, writer, gardener and photographer living and working in Cumbria. His poems have been published in literary journals in print and online, most recently appearing in Dream Catcher (forthcoming). He is currently working towards his first pamphlet.