Dark windowed, bleak black stacks fall overhung and snagged on steeping corners steps up and steps down
show yellow underskirts of sandstone
walls and gateposts, musket-pocked
cannon-ball hollowed by biting frost and breeze blowing gritty detritus in eddies and drills
that core your eyes out
Sandstone blocks, coal-smoked, charcoal coughed and coked
like stacked blackened loaves,
present a hard nose of soft stone
against the weather-blasted
howling Heathcliffe madscape
Slates gleam silver-gold sun-kissed as rain-clouds
And donkey-stoned steps go cap-in-hand
with the frantic semaphore of creamy-grey wash-line
rag-wagging
flags without a prayer
Past powder-paint heather and winter-hedge
iron tyres trundle their tattling gritty crush
On cart-clopped cobbles
jostling and jinking, the carter nods in the seat,
fetching and bringing odds and sods
to satisfy minimal requisites
He rumbles in through biblical rays
strobing through the cart spokes,
fanning the horizon
Where unseen moles turn out crumbly hillocks sheltered by walls
Walls laid stone by stone, hand over hand hiding relics of labours lost
down generations of weather and stony storms
And boney storms, rain-washing,
shushing and shuffling, pelting rabbit muck and gorse, spattering chalk-chested rams,
tail-tied lambs and udder-swung mothers
who skip the rubble of fallen walls
And there there it stalks the air
futtering in stasis,
black moon eye fixing, hushed
A profile of stealth,
with tearing tools
her yellow knife and fork prehensile, merciless, hungry mouths to feed,
yellow mouths that test the wind
on spiky elbows
that a cuckoo’s scoop can’t compare with
Yes there, and there
a ducking dart and twist
relocates her breezy-skied seat
She studies, she ascertains and some internal clock cries “enough” so she skeets to another sky-pog beyond binoculars back over town
where some carrion call has stunk up the menu
And a salt-glaze chimney offers respite
high above the bleak black stacks
They offer no regard for boys below,
making explosion noises
“he-he-her-ring” Tommy-gun spray,
and twanging ricochets.
Over-hand grenades of dried soil explode against walls that hide imaginary huns
Who are yet ignored by peggy-dolls
perched in prams, resting in rugs needed for washing, that’s timed between comings, goings and soot puthered smut
The sneck in the Z-planked door rattles
a rusty “ta ra”
and the sulphur-stunk, coal smoke day
coughs uphill and down dale
where an explosion of falcon muscle locates its lunch