KATHLEEN JONES

ABOVE MIDDLETON

From this hill the view is larger than God,
the weather less forgiving.

Rough land, honed by a battering wind
that thrums over the houses
and howls inside the head like a chained dog.

This is the cold that cracks stone,
breaks open keens on calloused fingers
for the few descendants of the long-forgotten dead

who moled the lead seams under the Pennines,
leaving their poisoned bones
in unmarked graves.

Their cottages are fallen stone
and the roofless church
has a congregation of nettles.

They lived, not without language
or music, or the violence
of loving and birthing and hunger.

Only a death brought them down,
ill-suited in their mildewed best
to walk twelve miles to church -

buried, christened, married in job lots.
Crossing their brief marks against the register
of unrecorded lives.

Even their work is hidden
in pipes, drains, the linings of coffins,
or beaten flat in the gutters

of redundant churches, divers' boots,
the hems of old velvet curtains, fishermen's weights,
the deadly interior of a nuclear flask.