Bob's poems are published below. Read & enjoy. His latest poem will appear after his first scene setting and evocative poem.
For the first poem of my residency I wanted to convey something of the history of the area. St Matthew’s Churchyard stands at an ancient crossroads, embodying all the folklore associated with the meetings of ways. Roman and British coins were discovered hereabouts, which suggests some sort of skirmish two millennia ago.
I have used early spellings of local place-names, the first two of which will be clear enough. The others are Upper Winteredge (near Coley Church), Woolrow (on the Calderdale Way between Bailiff Bridge and Thornhills), and Rookes Wood, Norwood Green. Estfelde Knowl was a field-name, and was situated to the east of what is now Knowle Top Road, at the southern end.
Elland Flags is the sandstone, excellent for building, which was quarried at many sites in the old township of Hipperholme-cum-Brighouse, and almost up to the present day.
Absence
They had their lives
in this discarded room:
on the green chaise longue
shared love and loss,
heard the slow clock turn
through the cut of their days
while here, now, no echo
of clinking china teacups,
no footfalls in the hall,
winter blazing in the hearth;
only an elegy of emptiness
waiting for the past.
Suggested by photos of the luxurious rooms of Crow Nest mansion, and my recollection of playing in those same rooms, now crumbling, prior to their demolition in the early 1960s. Several generations of the Walker family, Titus Salt, Richard Kershaw. Wealthy people, yet touched by the same emotions as everyone.
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In the records are names of about 11,000 local people buried in St Matthew’s churchyard since 1710. Most are just a name; nothing else is known. It’s reasonable to assume that, since there was a chapel on this site from at least 1529, many more were interred before records began. In their cases, not even a name survives.
The Unknown
In the mornings we rose to toil
in the grey fields. We loved,
and mourned the loss
of those we loved, felt
the cold coming over the knoll,
lolled on drystone walls,
warm in the summer sun,
another day done.
No pew in the church,
no servants or nurse,
no chiselled dates, no words
to tell the years to come
we were better than we’d been.
Beasts in the fields our epitaph,
ground ploughed over and over,
sowing and harvesting,
numb of winter,
sweat of summer.
And generations, through centuries,
unthinking of the labour, the loving
and grieving, that’s gone before,
and will follow, endlessly.
Until its closure in 1969 Brookes Ltd was a dominant presence at the Hipperholme end of Lightcliffe. Its ‘buzzer’ marked the hours of the working days, resonating around the district at 7.30, mid-day, 12.45 and 4.30. As children we played amongst its labyrinth of railway lines, kilns, chemical works, quarries and its huge hangar-like buildings and yards, where ‘Nonslip’ kerbstones and paving-stones were produced and stored.
At the time of its demise, Brookes was run by three grandsons of the founder, Joseph Brooke. These three, John Newton Brooke, William Aspinall Newton Brooke and Edward Newton Brooke, the sons of Newton Brooke, are all interred at St Matthew’s, as is their uncle, Willie Brooke, who died in a railway accident in 1903.
Many of the workers were Latvians. At that age we didn’t understand how they’d fled their Eastern European homeland in the Second World War, that they’d left behind families and friends they would never see again.
Playing Out
Kilns cooling in the brickworks,
engines cleaned and shut in the shed,
paving-stones stacked like packs of cards
across wide yards in the 1950s’
Saturday afternoon standstill.
No to-ings and fro-ings of Latvians
from the wooden hostel
at the bottom of the track,
a life away from their long trek west
from Bajari, from Skundra, Riga, praying
for an overcrowded train, carrots
in abandoned fields, a small boat.
Easy to say they settled here.
Too young to wonder what dark fires
Otto and Leon doused each dawn,
we wandered the sleeping workplace
in jumpers knitted by our grandmas,
short trousers and Davy Crockett hats,
dust still hanging in the aftermath.
January
I go among headstones,
last summer’s leaves,
in a new year,
opaque and cold; time
of the winter waiting.
From close cover
a wren blurs
the edge of vision, lights
an instant at the top
of a fallen cross,
cock-tailed and querulous.
Two fields away
the cricket pavilion
is an anachronism,
clock stopped
at September.
Here are chiselled words
for the wordless,
not gone but growing.
The coexistent dead:
seasoned, lasting again
into lengthening days.
On the homepage of this website, click on 'About the Churchyard'. On the left, just over halfway down that page, click on 'Click here to read about people of interest ...' Last on the list is Private James Smallwood. Click on Private James Smallwood.pdf and scroll to the bottom of the last page of Dorothy Barker's article, where you will find a photo of Roydlands Farm, home of the Smallwood family. Or press here. As a child I knew this as 'Smallwoods' Farm'.
The poem merely references the farm, and is more concerned with the iconic premises, not in the photo, on the opposite side of Wakefield Road, where, as Dorothy mentions, the same trade is carried on 60 years later. Although the poem is not really about that, either.
Christine
Some time ago I visited John Clare’s cottage, now a museum, in Helpstone, Northamptonshire. He’s also buried in the village, at St Botolph’s Church. Clare is often referred to as a ‘peasant poet’, a term which sounds condescending these days. However, what he was, and remains, is a humble and moving poet of nature, as well as much else. Even during his final desolate decades in Northampton Asylum a deep love of the birds, flowers, trees and creatures amongst which he’d lived his life was often a solace.
I’m certainly not comparing myself to Clare, but the poet’s great lesson, for me, is that it’s always possible to open ourselves to the natural life which surrounds us.
April the Ninth
Yggdrasil, the World Tree, represented as a gigantic ash, is central to Norse mythology. Its many mythical and legendary qualities are represented in almost all the world’s cultures. This particular ash tree occupied the corner of a field between the cricket ground and the churchyard until about 40 years ago. (Three Days Work was/is a field-name.)
World Tree
Corporal Joseph Naylor of the 5th Dragoon Guards, a Lightcliffe man, took part in the Crimean War of 1854-56 with 250 of his regiment. He was one of the 30 who survived the campaign, only 14 managing to bring back their horses. If you want to know more about Corporal Naylor, his family and descendants, go into About the Churchyard on the website, scroll down until you come to Click here …people of interest … then scroll down to Corporal Joseph Naylor. You’ll find the results of Dorothy Barker’s excellent and detailed research. Or press here and then scroll down.
The Charge of the Heavy Brigade
This part-found poem is based on a recent Guardian article by the writer Robert Macfarlane, expressing his concern that we are losing our connection with the natural world. Many people, not just children, no longer recognise the flora and fauna which surround us. One out of three can recognise a magpie, but nine out of ten know what a Dalek is. Three-quarters of adults cannot identify an ash tree.
A ‘Hollowing’, according to Macfarlane, is a portal into the natural world.
Hollowings
to a child who has never seen a wren?
Never caught the blue spark of kingfisher
across dapples of deep-water sunlight?
to be bound in deep time?
Will hopeless words survive,
like rattles filled with ash,
in the dark that is always rising?
with the slow un-naming of land,
great thinning of bird and animal,
of insect and tree, vanish past memory?
Past mouths, and minds’ eyes?
with charms of goldfinches
and the blended singing
of lost children in the woods?
Two short poems to lighten the midwinter darkness.
Solstice
Turning
