Lamonby / Moonset

Lamonby / Moonset


Rain wrapped cemetery day, back when work could wait,
poetry read aloud on Radio 4
the kind that creeps in and resides inside
and makes a home
as time ticked by

through coincidence, charm or fate
I find myself in the sun-dried hedgerows, the moon-carved hills
where these poems sprang from dark, hidden springs
I read aloud those lines as cows muddle past the front door
twice daily, dripping milk, spit and shit
Rooks chuckle and shout but somehow whisper a name

a name I have in my head since that cemetery day,
condensated truck, whispering strange poetic syllables
which haunts me as a collection of jumbled words,
...Jackself...

strangeness, how a man I have never met,
can hide within a landscape, memories which resonate,
resonate and reach back to my own eldritch childhood
hundreds of miles from here
and I uncover them, in strata; of brittle brown bramble branches,
broken snail shells and blackbird bones

feeling like I am poking around in someone else's house,
a derelict, sad house, full of familiar dust and Lamonby's ghosts
and I am watched, by today's blackbirds whom I do not know,
whom do not know myself, but they know himself... Jackself

so I read again those lines like some kind of spell,
some kind of incantation, and I remember that cemetery day
and I walk these lanes,
...Jackself's lanes,
a darkness hunched within a bright summer day.