Limestone Landscape, Littondale, by J. D. Taylor

This is a landscape where the walls have taken over, or so it seems.
Down here is a wall farm. They grow best in the light, whitening
like the bones of those who made them. Some chequered penance.
In hard winters, in false springs, lambs are fed to the walls.
Men come flat-capped and scowl at their own wool hardness.
Nothing to a wall their ancestors made for the keeping in of.
What is kept in? The years. The bouldering losses, friable crags
for yet more walls. Put in a gate and eventually it falls.
Like a bronze age brooch to pin a cloak the gate goes down.
Sheep repeat themselves without progression within walls.
The walls hold down pasture the weather would tear off.
Strung out buddhas on a crumbling cosmos, their weight is their weight,
the undeflected gestures, carrion stare of stone.
Barrack-squared, the occupation is efficient. Time runs on time.
Authority is earthed. What is above ground is wired.
It may not look live but it presides. The walls were made,
had themselves compiled painstakingly, a lexis of restraint,
a dialect of the tribe who nipped fingers and calloused
hands that once loved wives. Walls used backs to vault up scarps,
backs long since asleep after all the sheep are counted in.
Yet men come to hang fresh gates and whistle lithe dogs through arcs.
Sheep are bowled along tuning up in piecemeal union.
New bad weather arrives breathless with intelligence in its gauntlet.
The walls were not always here. Tell them it will not always be this way
- if you dare. You can't even rest against one in comfort.
And they leak the wind. When it rains they sweat and dewdrop.
They have not changed since they were rushed up and stiled.
A crag can sing, a wire keen, but a wall cannot mutter.
They expressed a purpose for a while. They were a kind of dress.
We walk through them, warm and confused in our integral cells,
where the quick light blazes and the blood glows, skin deep.
We are still here, ready and able to serve man, woman, sheep or stone.
Yes, able to descend even to the servitude of broken rock.
A wall cannot give. It just is: tool, passage, solution, endeavour.
Very satisfying it is to push one over, but we mustn't.