Where Youth Did Tread

(An Addingham poem) ‘There! Where every curve injects another memory.’ Analytic beauty that nestled in verdant valley allows the mind to review, where archaic dry-stone walls enhance the ancestral ghosts, impeccable trees, nature’s guardian to one’s heady days, inscribed when lovers called. Now historic brows lost within the village face, expressive meadows from a bygone age did grace now lay in waste, every thistle upon throstle nest cut down and stone barns redundant. For cement and brick replace the gathering blooms, fertile soil lay under macadam and house numbers supersede the hawthorn hedge, and old ‘Bram’ on horse and cart daily down moor lane long gone and dead. Oh. Them old manifestations embedded, the labour of many a village son, where leaf and wood do part but once a year, after seasons of regrowth give way to winter’s ascetic sun that rolls across Rombald’s moor. ‘Oh. Yes, the sun, one thing that man has not yet changed.’ © Harry J Horsman 2021