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.

If you want to see more of my poems or buy yourself a booklet please head over here.

 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