For Douglas Clark Poem by Sally Evans

Although we don't recall an overlap
we owned the same secret land
of Country Durham,
flat, unregarded, whale-shaped,
filled with vivid pink flora
and plover ridden wastes

A world to make what we could of
like the wider one,
a world with an underclass
of the clergy and landowners
where the length of farm tracks
and number of badger setts
height of ash trees
or thickness of Woogra Wood
were things that counted.

It is odd to think
we were children in neighbouring villages
when the memories are not of being children
but of the fresh angst of artists,
of libraries plundered,
of country words dipped deep in poet's ink.

Our bicycles upended
in the same country lanes
where we struggled with hedges
in clay and leaf-fall,
Treasure Island
under Bishopton Bridge,
or a Stillington steam-train
snorting in darkness
and the haunted interiors
of rag-rugged farms.

'Don't send me poems any more'
you said last year
but this year you said
'Send your Durham poems.
Don't forget.'