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Herbert Lomas

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'But The Jewel You Lost Was Blue'

...and you were the blue rose
the unattainable, the impossible


Dear Ted, when I was playing with
my Uncle Wilf’s World War One revolver,
and my cousin Jack in Mytholmroyd,
you’d be toddling round the little town
somewhere, and I didn’t know it.

We both saw the River Calder silvering its pebbles,
swam in the black canal, stared at
Stoodley Pike, drank the wind
on Whirlaugh and watched the moorland sheep
scampering over bent grass and dropping pills.

I played by Calder’s ‘rapid stream’
with the lasses, my dog, and white mice, while you
walked by the ‘confluence of river mouths’
behind your brother’s gun in the killing hills.
But we both had fathers and uncles who never spoke

about Passchendaele or the Somme.
Whether from the steep walls of the valley
‘we got out of, though it didn’t get out of us’,
or from walks we don’t remember on the moors of sleep,
our mouths still wander the Pennine tops.

Then, only days before you died, I read
how you’d held dead Sylvia’s head
in the Underground, and I wrote that
‘life and death are not two separate kingdoms
and relationships are not severed by death’.

Now as I hold the letter you sent
three weeks before you died, it tingles
with you still. ‘And,’ you wrote, ‘that both our books
should end, as they do, on that particular poem
is a bit uncanny, isn’t it?

 

Page(s) 45-46

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