Nostalgia For The North Poem by C Richard Miles

I have long left those native Northern lands
Still stocked with many a shaded, leafy lane,
Unspoilt by city’s peace-less pestilence:
Cold-hearted, concrete toilsome towers,
Where countryside now never reigns.

I often long for lonely Lakeland’s length
With frosty fells and silvery, trout-filled tarns
Whose wistful woods and fresh, lush, flower-filled fields
In deep, steep-sided valleys gouged,
Surround its scattered, flagstone farms.

I dare desire the drowsing, distant Dales,
Whose limestone rocks and rugged, rearing crags
Edge bloom-drenched summer hayfield-meadow’s sward,
Whose drystone walls stand out stark white
And shred the green to squares of rags.

I still can crave for Craven’s rolling drumlin-fleet,
Each one a sloping, sleeping moraine-mound
Which floats, an isolated ice-left islet boat
On grassy sea of timothy and Yorkshire Fog
Where chewing cattle graze the ground.

I must yet yearn for yonder Yorkshire far,
With ancient abbeys, hills and winding, hidden dales
And towering, crumbling, stone-stacked castles tall,
Surveying flower-decked, far-flung fields
Where Swaledale sheep shake fleecy tails.

But I live in dreary, listless London town
And must make do and dream my North in mind instead
With whispered words and thoughts fast fleeting by,
But poetry’s pictures, past times’ remembered rhymes
Revive lost landscapes in my head.