We drove the kids North East to
our adopted hinterland
of moreish moorland, the Brontes
heath and heather hiding-place,
near peacock splendid Castle Howard.

Town kids need more stimulation,
animal animation.
A newly opened zoo park
offered flamingos in the pink,
fapping, fluttering, squarking
round a stinking muddy pool.

We splashed about, rain soaked,
licking mud spiced ice creams,
shivering, slipping, thinking
it's what you try to do for kids.

He sees through it, like
the young tend to do,
a modern stone sculpture
with holes you can see through.

Having recently read
'The Emperir's New Clothes',
he thinks they're at it again,
expensively baffling brains.

He looks through the spy holes
at their puzzled attention,
amused at the bemused,
using their words of pretension.

They're patrolling the walls again,
but not in the rain, a ragbag
army of volunteers. Traffic rattles
through, but not the charioteers.

They're searching lurching through the past,
not seeking to know what dreadful deeds
religion's deadly kisses, or excessive powers
have granted, but how life was, in short visits.

There are others, who could know how
man treatred man to misery,
through ****, rope, fire and blade,
even the big dipper thrills brigade.

The Calder cut a channel
through the ancient stones of Elmet,
sculpting minds of millstone grit
in moorland weavers' kin.

Poetry coursed his veins.
Clotted domestric pain
flooded his synapse.
His shrouded fame collapsed.

It's eighteen twenty-six,
a deserted esplanade,
no hen nights, no fish 'n chips,
an onshore wind, a wave cascade.

An observer sits at waters' edge
on a rotting timber sledge.
He's looking seaward, not watching,
not waiting, deeply contemplating.

Then he paints a picture of this place,
a record in suble water colour,
of a man on a sledge at the waters' edge.

They call it still life. All
as still as death. Perhaps
the painter's hand was also stilled
in contemplation, rapt, fulfilled.

Glum fish, lolling pheasants,
bread and cheese, garlic, cherries,
apples, oranges, lemons,
but it's the light that pleases.

Ravelling, revealing vision,
casting shadows, changing shapes,
glinting glasses, devilling detail,
the time warp of the stopped clock.

There's a myth that when you finish
a good book, the author dies for you.
At least, I often feel a sense of loss.
I was near the end of a fine book of essays.
I heard the author was dying, incurable.

Famous mass media man, favoured
by the more selective viewers, journalist,
interviewer, novellist, cultured critic,
humourist, philosopher, a thinker's man.

Ought I to have read that final essay,
defy the myth? Next day I scanned
the papers. His death was not reported.
I trust we both breathed normally again.