Malham

This sleeping mountain is a whale
floating out of grey water,
mottled black and plastered white.
It is old and will not wake,
for us it is forgotten
in darkness and obscurity,
and to our nightblind eyes nothing
more than a silent blurred shadow.
But if we leave our lamp-lit rooms,
and walk up pitch black lanes to scare
ourselves, hands trailing dry stone walls,
and blink and breathe into a dark
so tarry thick our lungs are tight,
what answer will our questions meet?
What words of love and comfort will
our whispers incantate? And when
we cannot find the wall again,
are lost and blind and orphaned, cold
to our bones, frostbitten and blue,
what else to do but simply leave
our shoes by the roadside and strip
off frosted clothes and walk once more
as children out into the snow?
To be absolved, naked and white,
new again, clean and frozen, still,
and found in hollows on the hill
curled up together or alone,
thoughtless, wordless, far from home,
but peaceful, undisturbed by dreams.