In Praise of Wandering 

As walking is still an option for most of us in lockdown here is a piece in praise of traipsing around.

Prologue to a Traipsing

I stand, conduit with the flowing

road that runs down from Stanage,

out of the mass-trespassed moors.

Above Ringinglow I watch as the

dark tar river issues into wet yet

rapidly sun-burnished Sheffield.

I stand, conduit, to expectancy,

of a wandering, a gritty itinerancy,

tramping the damp road, mirroring

the flow of my near sixty years,

the city filling my wind glossed sight

ready to enter an unsteady future.

I stand, conduit at a confluence,

the deep seams of ore and ire,

my history in factory shutting Sheffield

and Maltby, striking pit, pounded,

distant in time and view from here,

moribund hinterland to steel’s grave.

I stand, conduit to uncertainty

boxed in by old streets echoing,

seeking a way to walk the city,

to write the pages of present days,

pad blank with unknowing, a loosener

for tongues tied up by being ignored.

I stand, conduit to make a start,

more than a maudlin requiem,

or a sad and mawkish oration,

well packed with an ear-shine

of listening, walking on to meet

the newly arrived and the left behind.

I stand, conduit to a troubled hope,

in search of the sliders who slip

between marrow and bone, those

whose viscous honesty and

anarchic incursions rupture all

that tight-limbed electoral thinking.

I stand, conduit to these first steps,

to tread the valley riven streets with

fresh boots, the peak’s rain whetting

my resolve to walk a poetry of traipsing,

to write a flow of treading; to transcribe

tough, the unalloyed lines of a retold city.