Sunday 3 August 2014

Come rain or sunshine - The Wyre river rolls along gracefully.


 








Wyre’s Sweet Summer Song On A Rain-sodden Day

Soft dripping rain
Turns torrential
God’s tap is in full flow

Lush meadows
Sprinkled with buttercups
The yellow sun, broken into fragments
Twinkling across dewy fields

Cows
Munch away on the sodden grass
Oblivious to the driving rain, the ceaseless traffic drone
The walkers who watch and moan
About the weather 

Centre piece of this scene
Is the majestic River Wyre
Flowing serene
A sensuous, sleeping serpent
Wrapped around the fields and fells and glistening dells
Of the countryside

Sweet Wyre’s song of a sodden summer
Is a joy to behold
Even in the pouring rain
Its timeless beauty
Is there for everyone... 

Angela Norris





We Sailed

Oil-barrelled rafts of youth
Ripple the waters no more
There eager shadows sought
Fortune awaiting abroad
The fading echo hailing
Lone ferry to cross bank
The photo sepia
The memory vivid. 

Barry McCann



Fleetwood Fires 
Wyre light -
designed by a blind man
to give sailors sea-sight
and safe passage by night
along the rolling salt-road
to their Fleetwood home -
you stood two miles off shore
in Morecambe bay
and shone diopic bright
a century or more
until yourself consumed by fire
in nineteen forty eight…
 
Lower light -
securely land based,
whitestone faced
and only half the height of anterior Pharos -
you sat classically squat and square
on elevated Wyrebank
but were far from inferior;
pivotal, rather,
in this trinity of incandescence
back in the day
when trawler captains used your nine-mile beams
to fix their fishy way…
 
Finally [upper] Pharos light -
eighth wonder of the world?
flaring deep sandstone red
on sunny days -
you rose majestic
as a totem of this once aspiring town;
solid, steadfast, shapely tapered tower
topped by that magical prismatic mirror
which had the power
to magnify a candle’s brightness
and throw it far into the bight,
pinning the blackness of the night… 
 
As epilogue -
Victoria Pier burned down in two thousand eight.
Britian’s penultimate was both the shortest
and the shortest-lived.
Now only a masonry stump remains
plans to rebuild it proved in vain -
and so, lights sputter
gutter
and are gone
leaving a history
of ghostlike wraiths of smoke
in their wake… 
 
Steve Rowland

 



 
 


 
 SD563543
 
Across creased landscapes, wide enough to fill a floor
the lines are drawn, nail-scoured a divot deep
cross Beatrix Fell, past Shooter’s Hut, Camp Bridge
her finger crushing vaccaries beneath
gouged damage
where a dint erodes, makes sinkholes swallow sheep,
sends trees on downward heltering
here, where a rabbit run, a badger path, marked with shaving bristles,
caught on staves of fencing, moles as minims
became a rut, a route, a coffin-path, a road,
once was a unique view, hair first wind parted
here
was once a quivered mesh of grass
seen from five foot high
heart opening to the sea.
 
Rachel McGladdery
 


 

2 comments:

  1. Carry On - Walking On Wyre. Well done to all involved. Most enjoyable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. At the very first Walking on Wyre workshop, Rachel and Kath Curtiss stayed behind while the rest of us went walking along the river. On our return, Rachel was let up with delight. Kath, an avid and adventurous walker had her maps strewn on the work table. "I 've been learning to understand the landscape for a map," Rachel explained. Later she produced the beginnings of this incredible poem and a joyful memory for me. It was a grand day.

    ReplyDelete

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