Poem: The road to Mam Tor is impassable to traffic

The road to Mam Tor is impassable to traffic

A yellow splash of paint marks the head
a driven rivet in the road
a surgeon’s spray, now a sign
forgotten gesture of a long lost hope

A yellow flower decorates a fissure,
Overgrown, close-knit with grass.
The tarmac surface lifts and bends
four hundred warped and laddered yards

This buckled climb, once steep, now fractured,
Long off the tourists’ travel plan
no injected steel or pin will
untwist this broken high way’s spine

Mam Tor – not just a peak, but valley mother,
mastectomy of weakened stone
Is scalpel slashed winter by winter
Its flesh revealed, its muscles torn

I remember Mam Tor mists from way back
When in, my teenage cavern guiding days,
‘You can’t see ‘tor today Bettie’
Would stretch our coffee-and-twix tea-breaks

Today I climb high summer paths.
Heat lifting thermals of distant sheep cries
Flinging fine dust from Earl’s cement works
scorching into my swelling eyes

I now climb in sun
blinded not by tears from visiting
my brother’s grave in the valley below
but from the pulverized lime
carried in on the High Peak breeze

I can’t see the ridge of our hills, his valley,
Or the trains that pass his grave at
exactly twenty to the hour.

I can’t see the tor today