Bus Ride To Hebden Bridge Poem by C Richard Miles

Today I took the bus to Hebden Bridge
Past unremembered farmsteads on the moor,
No longer proud but broken, bowed by time,
All tumbled down to skeletons of stone,
Lost monuments where humble herders toiled,
Sheep-echo sheds of emptiness and cold.

Cloud-whistled wind moaned concentrated cold
Through gap-toothed wall and crumbling, packhorse bridge
To harass stumbling storm-soaked flocks which toiled,
Straggle-grass gatherers on mist-washed moor,
In constant battle not to turn to stone
Imprisoned in harsh iciness of time.

Sedge sheds the grasp of winter’s world-sleep time
As sun-shards slice through grassblade-grasping cold
Unloosening shoots to shatter frost-bound stone,
Suffused with showers into rainbow’s bridge,
Bright colour-crowning sepia-tinted moor
Where spring’s chromatic portrait-artist toiled.

The hill-slow, stuttering, rattling engine toiled
To reach the brackened crest just one more time
Where wide expanse of wind-kissed, tussocked moor
Withstands the calumny of crushing cold
That aims to leach all life and build a bridge
To join the earth to ice’s solid stone.

The straw-lined hollows set between the stone
Reveal where pied mew-crying lapwings toiled
Constructing nests beside green-lichened bridge,
Where they will soon begin to lay, in time,
Their speckled eggs safe-sheltered from the cold
In camouflage to match the mottled moor.

From here I take my leave of Haworth Moor
Descending steeply to the streets of stone
Where coal-smoke from the mills kept out the cold
As spinners, weavers, piecers duly toiled
In what is now a long-forgotten time
At Nutclough, Pecket Well and Hebden Bridge,
Whose ancient bridge, built strong of Yorkshire stone
Where Hebble runs cold from surrounding moor,
Is glad I toiled to visit one more time.