Yorkshire's Autumn-Winter Transition Poem by Mark R Slaughter

Throughout the years
these alternating hues of
northern lands -
blue-to-green-to-grey -
have borne my faithful aureole
of life

And as I pause,
caught within a dearth of clearer thought -
my gaze blank upon the heather -
I feel through blackening panes
my Autumn -
my thick'ning blood
in tune

I wish to be the stoutened oak -
the giant Quercus,
like a rock
silhouetted purple under sun's wake;
through the many generations
it has claimed its rights o' land,
become the land

The background of my room
flows in thermals;
Elgar calms my inner ear;
port hangs heavy on a weary hand,
my faith soothes in cool robusto clouds

In me, I'm never alone:

I peer further:
The way of Yorkshire stone -
a never-ending path
dissolving in the deathless fields;
dry stone walls
rise up thro' their lichen camouflage,
line the lineage of Yorkshire's farmstead lives
(reminding me
that yonder hill, dale, moor and mind
I'll die inside the nithered air
of country wilds)

At altitude
where scale becomes a new perspective,
enormity of evolution hovers
in its empire of the skies:
Tho' the red kite never smiles
(except inside his head upon a kill) ,
I know he knows he's Lord -
Aerial self-possession
travels in his eye;
he's on! to other realms
to leave us in the dusk
to shiver through the air's anticipation:

Night:
The scarred moon spreads out
its yellowed silver,
smudges paved strata
honed from cloud;
below, a hulk of Friesians
somehow cozied up
in their refrigerated cosmos,
lashes hanging on the air -
their en chamade of silence,
mantra

The last blue vestige
bleeds black;
a cutting breeze
sharpens the bone,
chills the marrow,
deepens death

Ice

It's bloody cold
beyond the South
where all becomes the snow

Yet my heart rests
In Yorkshire's moors ‘n' dales
subsumed
below

Copyright © Mark R Slaughter 2014