Basil's Land [basil Bunting] Poem by Sally Evans

The gentle Northern tongue
travel took not from me,
the Scots would not look on,
Southrons would sing wrong,
I heard in tree and dale,
beck and fell,
but only one
who used the sound well
where Yorkshire is south,
Stainmore the backbone,
opened his mouth,
made notes drip from stone
where high on the fell
a windswept tree looked out,
saw the scars of the sea,
forces, an estuary,
in his own land only
Northern mid-light,
a vocabulary of vision,
solitude, delight.

1985
[Basil Bunting]