The wall walks the fell —
Grey millipede on slow
Stone hooves;
Its slack black hollowed
At gulleys and grooves,
Or shouldering over
Old Boulders
Too big to be rolled away.
Fallen fragments
Of the high crags
Crawl in the walk of the wall.
A dry-stone wall
is a wall and a wall,
Leaning together
(Cumberland-and-Westmorland
Champion wrestlers),
Greening and weathering,
Flank by flank,
With filling of ribble
Between the two —
A double-rank
Stone dyke:
Flags and through —
April is National Poetry Month and every day the peaceCENTER will be posting a poem about walls, fences, edges, borders. . . you get the idea. Walls that separate us, protect us, define us, challenge us . . . we collected these poems for our Walls Symposium in 2009.
Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) was an English poet, known for his association with the Cumbrian town of Millom. His poetry is noted for its local concerns, straightforwardness of language, and inclusion of elements of common speech.
