I’m in the process of editing a third booklet of poems. It takes me something like 2-4 years to get one finished because things need to be left to cool and develop, you need time away from it. I have a ghost document of poems that don’t quite fit in.
This is one of those poems. It’s about Semerwater, a lake in the Yorkshire Dales in north-east England that I visited in May 2018.
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Semerwater She sleeps on the shoreline ashes pulsing to life in the hills for the last time ruined barns bake again in the afternoon sun flies land on my thumbs all by the lake built by mistake the dumping of rocks and silt by forces without name forces without a prior reputation for landscape-scale devastation a time before we were there to croon and ascribe blame at the sidelines or did we Semerwater at its edges a hare striding see-saw of a thing. © Daniel James Greenwood 2020
Grand poem – and Semerwater not far from the village from where in distant ancestry I got mt name of Bainbridge!
Thanks John. Oh wow your name comes from that village! When I walked to Semerwater it was from Askrigg so passed through Bainbridge. Seems as big as Reeth but much more quiet.
Well, I was born in the Midlands, but I suspect it all started there generations before.
My surname originates from Greenwode, a once wooded area in Yorkshire long ago
A grand name!
Love these lines…
forces without a prior reputation
for landscape-scale devastation
Really making me ponder these forces now. Would like to see this lake.
Thanks Allison! It’s in Wensleydale, there’s a local ale named after it.