Poetry Friday

Elmet is still the name on maps for a part of West Yorkshire that includes the deep valley of the upper Calder and its watershed of Pennine morland. These poems confine themselves to the upper Calder and the territory roughly encircled by a line drawn through Halifax (on the east), Keighley (on the north-east), Colne (on the north-west), Burnley (on the west), and Littleborough (on the south-west): an ‘island’ straddling the Yorks-Lancs border, though mainly in Yorkshire, and centred, in my mind, on Heptonstall. Elmet was the last independent Celtic kingdom in England and originally stretched out over the vale of York.

[…]

Physically inhospitable, cut off to north and south by the high moorland, the insularity of the valley was in some ways almost complete, in others anything but. – TH

Moors

Are a stage

For the performance of heaven.

Any audience is incidental.

A chess-world of topheavy Kings and Queens

Circling in stilted majesty

Tremble the bog-cotton

Under the sweep of their robes.

Fools in sunny motley tumble across,

A laughter — fading in full view

To grass-tips tapping at stones

The witch-brew boiling in the sky-vat

Spins electrical terrors

In the eyes of sheep.

Fleeing wraith-lovers twist and collapse

In death-pact languor

To bedew harebells

On the spoil-heaps of quarries.

Wounded champions lurch out of sunset

To gurgle their last gleams into potholes.

Shattered, bowed armies, huddling leaderless

Escape from a world

Where snipe work late.

Beginning notes and poem taken from “Elmet” by Ted Hughes