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

 

 

 

 

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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