Martha won joint-first in our 2022 Young People’s Poetry Competition.

 

dismal plains, grassandpeat storm-blast-sog-bogged,

sweep flat beneath shockedbooming dins;

withered, heather-clad hands, boulders reach palms up

to empty, slate-blue clouds, edging orange like burntpaper embers, folding

themselves around the brown-tinged moor edges,

are a bleak caress for this carcass of a landscape.

 

 

gritstoned rocks lined up in toothedgrimace grin grimly

as two lone pines rise tall against neglected backdrops of fallen

stone walls, whilst disused quarries

rust around antiqued machineries

that frame amber against lour skies.

 

burnt wound-scorches of moor pattern the act,

dripping tears that quench blackening swollen rivulets

through waters now steriled with ash and moss-laced peat-grit.

these filtered waters spit through other pitted, matted, mottled

soils feeding split-layered mires, cadavers of aging ghosts of extinct plants.

 

the lone curlew scans its familiar outlook, on reconnaissance,

no doubt combing the empty byways

with this phwitt phwitt phwitt phwitt sounding a dire warning.

a dew pond diffracts light from a thinning moon,

pallid in its early evening dress and reflects

 

purple heathland blazed with paling cotton grasses

mirroring weightless rouge-rimmed clouds;

a creeping redness of fescue grasses sweeping

the moor’s resurgence like a fox’s brush.

 

root-laced paths carve ever-deepening

contours into rippled mosses.

while sprawling skies starve the broad wings

of a blizzard of buzzards that lunge blindlyspinning down through

a blackcloud of explodingcrows.

 

a sole hen harrier plunges in barred brown-and-white,

white-and-brown smudges as it

glides through bog-asphodel-tinged marshes,

whilst ragged rowans reach their red-berried fingertips to the

green hairstreak butterflies that dance to

the call of the short-eared owl.

 

a leaping mountain hare, whose stare is a blur of star,

shivers from its blaeberry bush to witness this rebirth of a moor.