Coffin of Iron

Photo:  WHB – Somerset, 2019   ©

He had died of his wrinkles
Liver spots and age lines
Gnarled and creviced skin
Dusted and singed
By his Lifetime’s fevered furnace
His lungs smoke-charred
Legacy of a thousand undoused fires

As old as the hills he trod
As the bubbling beck he bled
I see six stalwart pall bearers
Hard as ancient twisted nails
Arise from their bed of iron
Raise the dead-weight anvil
His final ferrous coffin
To shoulder height
Begin a steady passage
Through the leaden winter streets
Beneath those snow-clad Northern Hills
Their shrouded clouded sky
Seemingly forever draped
Atop the silent iron tomb

Carried through the dark gate
To its final resting place
Fitting memorial to a smith’s life
Gifted again to the ironstone earth

In memoriam: Harold Booth, Yorkshire blacksmith & farrier; 1909 – 1987

From a son to his father

River Of Iron

Skinningrove Beck

 

The water flows red

As it streams down from the hills

And I can’t help but feel

As it meets the cold North Sea

That it bears the blood of men

Who laboured in those mines

To bring the iron for me

 

Reverie #9: Echoes of the Past

Pen & Ink – WHB … Northern Hills

I need to listen to that hidden sound of silence
the murmur that thrills lost souls
and as it swells
reverberates among those distant heathered hills

I crave to hear it burgeon on that lonely land
that misty moor of distant memory
where dwell lush images of the Green Hill
of the High Cliff
the Cass Rock
the Apple Garth
and the bubbling burbling beck
its red waters blooding its banks
with reminders of its ferrous track

A distant memory
rising from deep beneath those ancient northern hills
born of Nature’s cycle
birthed in ironstone
and nurtured in those recurring dreams of my youth
and the lasting images of my old age