Shame the WOL event at Hebden Bridge has been cancelled. I'm "up North" visiting family and was thinking of coming along! Here's a sestina I wrote on one of my visits. It was around Eastertime but I can't remember which year.

 

Bus Ride to Hebden Bridge

 

Today I took the bus to Hebden Bridge

Past unremembered farmsteads on the moor,

No longer proud but broken, bowed by time,

All tumbled down to skeletons of stone,

Lost monuments where humble herders toiled,

Sheep-echo sheds of emptiness and cold.

 

Cloud-whistled wind moaned concentrated cold

Through gap-toothed wall and crumbling, packhorse bridge

To harass stumbling storm-soaked flocks which toiled,

Straggle-grass gatherers on mist-washed moor,

In constant battle not to turn to stone

Imprisoned in harsh iciness of time.

 

Sedge sheds the grasp of winter’s world-sleep time

As sun-shards slice through grassblade-grasping cold

Unloosening shoots to shatter frost-bound stone,

Suffused with showers into rainbow’s bridge,

Bright colour-crowning sepia-tinted moor

Where spring’s chromatic portrait-artist toiled.

 

The hill-slow, stuttering, rattling engine toiled

To reach the brackened crest just one more time

Where wide expanse of wind-kissed, tussocked moor

Withstands the calumny of crushing cold

That aims to leach all life and build a bridge

To join the earth to ice’s solid stone.

 

The straw-lined hollows set between the stone

Reveal where pied mew-crying lapwings toiled

Constructing nests beside green-lichened bridge,

Where they will soon begin to lay, in time,

Their speckled eggs safe-sheltered from the cold

In camouflage to match the mottled moor.

 

From here I take my leave of Haworth Moor

Descending steeply to the streets of stone

Where coal-smoke from the mills kept out the cold

As spinners, weavers, piecers duly toiled

In what is now a long-forgotten time

At Nutclough, Pecket Well and Hebden Bridge,

 

Whose ancient bridge, built strong of Yorkshire stone

Where Hebble runs cold from surrounding moor,

Is glad I toiled to visit one more time.