1.
Surrounded by the countless dead
And restrained in illness to her bed
The hilltipped winds that seared her face
Made her young as they made her old

2.

The gamekeeper in his landrover
Comes down the rutted road
Faceless to the gate – a wave
Is a shadow across the moors

3.
The wind rises over drystone walls
Black-faced sheep chew straw in the folds

4.
Singed moors after snow has lifted
Lead imprint and right of way

5.
Where vacant ground and night
Make fair distance from sole light
Enticing intimacy from branches
Of mossed elm almost fallen

6.
Swaledale sheep on hillsides
So steep we’d fall crab-walking
Pinioned by the howlers
No leeward but stark and brazen
Grazing ’longside drystone walls
And their gravitas of sheep
On the brain following in their train
Shadow over ancient death of forest
Knowing hill ways and exposure
As visitors make for farmhouse lights
Taking hospitality gratis
On the verge of April lambing

7.
‘What though our path be o’er the dead’

The compression of forty or fifty thousand
upright and downright dead gathered under
few slabs and monuments written in lines
of dead crowding round water brackish
with their flow rootless though stone
lows with their charge of decay
clinging to hills and parsonage
hit with prayers and sickness
when heather blooms purple stains
and red grouse wings passionately
about ordering sense as bees
flyover stadia beneath ground
hive of inactivity

8.
Skeletons of forest
without uprightness
thorntrees (husband & wife
grafting)      hen harriers
over gamekeepers
contrived abruptness
wuthering it all

9.
Church shooting
electronics of curatorial
mongery chipping
stone in lieu of Luddites
non-toxic ammunition
purer water      birdlife?

10.
Consumption rooms
Passing the tombs
Small but not ‘so small’

11.
‘Mosaics of Heather’

Purple is the colour
of death’s industry:
red grouse habitat
sold as demi-nature,
to raise head above cover,
the ‘high-waving heather’
fed to succulence with fire,
beaten towards the guns,
octaves of ‘conservationists’.

The keeper has an eye
for patterns, he burns
to balance harvests,
interlocking lifelines,
roaming spirits.

Drystone walls hold
low dark skies in place.

Grouse fly fast.
They are wild
in ‘well-managed’
heather: water rolls
off the hill-farms
into reservoirs.
Red grouse scans
the moors. Dogs bark.
Ash swept beneath
pink light, pillules
of blood.

John Kinsella

CONTENTS: MAY 2012