Yesterday we drove through the moor
The quiet, windswept brown moor
With purple sedges and sheep-mown edges
Switchback, one track, roads overhung with hedges
Overhead and left pillows and banks of cloud, pale mid-grey
While to the right, black edged, dark grey threatened the day
Silence stretched across the vast endless tracts of moorland
No buildings, no pollution, untouched by man’s hand
Broken only by the sigh of the wind flying by
And the far distant cry of a bird from the sky
And the beck forever running, never tiring
Chuckling, burbling its delight, and us admiring
From our precarious position, our frailties and numbered days
His endless song, his enduring strength and pretty ways
And the sheep…
Written in Wetherby for Geoff Burgess
