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white-grey, wheel back, a shower coming in off the sea. All this. And sea urchins, Echinocardium, blown from the surf like bubbles of bone, the amazed O of all we could lose. Our weightless luck. Our brittle, spiky hearts. Hushings hushing: to silence; to wash out mineral deposits by releasing a torrent of water Clough Up on the tilt where the moor begins its slide into Lancashire and the village shrinks back at the sour peat out past the turbines we’re trying to make sense of what isn’t here: a clean sweep of mountain wasted sheer into wind, glaciers that snouted down from the north in a roar of rubble and sinkholes, burst open, sluicing green meltwater, drifted off into hag fleece, goits and headraces, limekilns, the yellow drench of their smoke. There’s a whole phantom moor in this washed-out clough and we’re feeling our way by echo location towards a hurly of diggers and carters, stokers, women hefting picks. Every winter the light falls more thickly, layer upon layer. The hushings are deepening by one millimetre a year. Ore There are things we remember only because of their absence, like a word I need for the light that blows in from the west after rain, or the hollow house in a field of bleached grass we walked to one hot afternoon – and now we’ve both lost the path back you think I’ve imagined the moment we pushed open the door onto summers of butterflies faded and heaped like old letters, their dry sift over the floor, their tiny stir in the draught. My father once told me a secret he’d learned as a child: 4 New Poetries VI
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the exact spot on the pavement where, if you stood very still, you could hear the river running beneath the street – a trap opening onto something implacable that would always be waiting. He remembered that all his life, but not where to stand. Snow after Salvatore Quasimodo,‘Neve’ Evening gathers into itself the earth and all its dear ones: gaunt men pulling military greatcoats round their narrow bodies, women wrung dry with crying. It dissolves trees into wind; it hollows us out to starved shadows dragging our heels over the fields of a planet lit by snow-shine. It gives us to our dead. We do not howl into the dark as we should. We do not beat our fists against the iron-black rim of this white sphere where our people lie buried around us. We give them the angry pulse in our foreheads, our heartbeats. They take the shape of breath from our mouths. We walk in silence, and in silence snow and night enfold us all, so tenderly. So tenderly. Some favourable effects on bird life of the bombardment of our cities Wrynecks were constantly heard around British Headquarters during discussions of aerodromes. Swallows looped over the lake. I watched the salients of their swerves, scribbled on a memo The destruction of the human population is no longer such a remote contingency as it used to seem. There’s a blackbird and a throstle sing on every green tree Judith Willson 5

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white-grey, wheel back, a shower coming in off the sea. All this. And sea urchins, Echinocardium, blown from the surf like bubbles of bone, the amazed O of all we could lose. Our weightless luck. Our brittle, spiky hearts.

Hushings hushing: to silence; to wash out mineral deposits by releasing a torrent of water

Clough

Up on the tilt where the moor begins its slide into Lancashire and the village shrinks back at the sour peat out past the turbines we’re trying to make sense of what isn’t here: a clean sweep of mountain wasted sheer into wind, glaciers that snouted down from the north in a roar of rubble and sinkholes, burst open, sluicing green meltwater, drifted off into hag fleece, goits and headraces, limekilns, the yellow drench of their smoke. There’s a whole phantom moor in this washed-out clough and we’re feeling our way by echo location towards a hurly of diggers and carters, stokers, women hefting picks. Every winter the light falls more thickly, layer upon layer. The hushings are deepening by one millimetre a year.

Ore

There are things we remember only because of their absence, like a word I need for the light that blows in from the west after rain, or the hollow house in a field of bleached grass we walked to one hot afternoon – and now we’ve both lost the path back you think I’ve imagined the moment we pushed open the door onto summers of butterflies faded and heaped like old letters, their dry sift over the floor, their tiny stir in the draught. My father once told me a secret he’d learned as a child:

4 New Poetries VI

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