The sounds of Old Norse tangle with the river, Gunnar’s-side, Muker, Thwaite and Keld. We speak each name and taste stone.
The old men watch us from the eaves of their caps, the lintels of their faces, knowing the hidden vehemence of the dale knowing the river can break its bonds, the bridge of our hands, the coracles of sunlight love would build.
This leaf I press, this bright film spooling in a black recess, I store for us under ling and moor, under Tan Hill and Oxnop Scar, where water dives through limestone bone by bone into the heart’s four caves.
Lynne Wycherley ‘Summer by the Swale’was previously published in Four Caves of the Heart. AnAnthology of 14Women Poets,edited by Myra Schneider and Caroline Price (Second Light Publications, London 2004). sof 69 January 2005 Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), supporter and critic of the French Revolution, lived in Paris and elsewhere in France from 1792 until April 1795.
'Summer by the Swale' was previously published in Four Caves of the Heart. An Anthology of 14 Women Poets, edited by Myra Schneider and Caroline Price (Second Light Publications, London 2004).