Look
Along the well
Of the street,
Between the gasworks and the neat
Sparrow stepped gable
Of the Catholic chapel,
High
above the tilt and crook
Of the tumbledown
Roofs of the town-
Scafell Pike,
The tallest hill in England.
How small it seems,
So far away,
No more than a notch
On the plate-glass window of the sky!
Watch
A puff of kitchen smoke
Block out peak and pinnacle -
Rock-pie of volcanic lava
Half a mile thick
Scotched out
At the click of an eye.
Look again
In five hundred, a thousand or ten
Thousand years:
A ruin where
The chapel was; brown
Rubble and scrub and cinders where
The Gasworks used to be;
No roofs, no town,
Maybe no men;
But yonder where a lather rinse of
cloud pours down
The spiked wall of the sky-line, see,
Scafell Pike
Still there.
Norman Nicholson
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Originally Posted by Hes
