Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Before the War
in some heavy-furnished foreign inn
that mezzotint

The Peak cannot be seen from any settled place, only from ruins. Like that shepherd’s cottage at the head of the pass, still protected by its storm-wrecked pines. A dream mountain, misty, remote, forlorn, long since adrift from time and place. Across the Great Waste, at the world’s end it lies. At its summit meet the domains of three lords, their names long lost, if ever known. The one ruled that pathless forest of dwarf oak to the north; the second a tumble of crags and drops; the third the great moor, with its meres and bogs.

Peak of the Three Lords
at the ford
I wash the mud from my boots

Beyond, the summit never gets nearer. Never. Mabinogion. Morte d’Arthur. How can this ever be reached or told?

After too many decades, here is unfinished business. So, one weekend in St Michael’s Little Summer, I speed up the A470 on the quest.

Grid ref 28053099 Mynydd Tri Arglwydd 469 m trig point

A very modest reality, it looks straightforward enough. But soon I am lost in a labyrinth of paths, tracks and forestry roads. Every two or three miles they knot into cross-ways which offer anything up to eight choices. Map and compass are no help, except that this appears to be Coed y Gesail-Armpit Wood, a place in which dreams sink.

At four ways
the compass spins
and three ways lie in wait

Sitting in the middle are three black and white hounds. No ordinary beasts are these. And without either horn or hunter. No sooner have they seen me than they lollop off along one of the tracks. I follow, and the same happens again and again. They leave no paw marks in the forest loam. Add their great red lolling tongues and I’m facing the three colours of the Celtic Otherworld.

Suddenly we break out on to bare moorland. The hounds have done their work and disappeared. A relief, if they were indeed the cwn annwn, the hounds who guide the dead.  I see the summit ahead, as grand and ordinary as it needs to be.

Rising from the heather
this crumbling concrete pillar
and a skylark’s song