MOMENTS

To be shaken awake,

To dress in the dark,

To leave the house quiet and stealthy;

Moments plucked from the pages

Of children’s adventure –

Arthur Ransome, or Biggles, or Blyton.

The known lanes of daytime

Are fluttered by headlights;

The moon’s a pale hint

Or a glint through the leaves,

While dawn’s a half-promise

At the edge of the sky.

Shoes clatter the pebbles

On a shore of the lake;

Fells loom in their slumber;

The dawn and the moonlight

Have merged in the water, dark

And unrippled, and shadowed in vapour.

From the end of the valley

A crackle and cough; and a growl;

And the rumble and grumble of a thunder

Man-made; and the whine of a turbine;

Then a silence, made loud

By the wisp of an echo.

Now a spit and a snarl, and a howl,

Such a howl, that comes screaming and yowling

Over the water, its crabbed shell

A monster, the white of the water

The head of an arrow, "Bluebird" at practise,

Its speed unimagined, its wake a cascade.

While those waters have settled, those moments

Don’t fade; years later they burst to the surface –

The day that Campbell and ‘Bluebird’

Cartwheel over and under, the machine

And the man in a personal compact,

In that moment that stabbed at the nation.