Chasing Flight

Chasing Flight Poems by Dan Crockett, grabs by Ollie Banks

1.

Songs for the Empty Sky 2. Ripples 3.

Chasing Flight

1. Songs for the Empty Sky Yorkshire teaches you frustration, disappointment, patience, cold. The tide will be too low in the morning, too high in the afternoon. As the wind turns, it will blow the promises away. Flatness. Then a golden moment arrives.

Heartwood Thrall T

he wyke rests its wildness Sleep now, beast, sleep For we dance in the dawn Deep in the heartwood Morning light comes strafing Parting the ancient oaks Landslides under urchin paws New pages in the book of stone That fiend with giant hands Who smacks eternal lips Groans a query: How long can this last?

Place of endless past Vast nothingness space Tree roots to the edge And beast face behind With fearsome breath Salt in the whiskers Fire torching the groves Burning to the brine The beck calling out: We are clinging to you You are our one hope

(But in cracked paving Plants grow thick and free Infinite capacity Of this tranquil land This rock and sand This mist-wrapped sea, To heal) From beast cliff a bird keens The peel rends Stitches in the cloth of time A final, futile roar appends: This is richer than gold The horizon lifts The beck boils Trees wrap the shoreline bends Falling from the cliff, Falling fast Flightless, unflying, not trying to soar but resigned to the crunch of the floor Tight with trappings The last question unheard Flightless birds

2. Ripples Suffolk is a blighted shore. As well as being on a sheltered part of a sheltered coast, the sea is pitifully shallow and there are huge chalk beds that block all but the most determined swell. We become used to staring at ripples dancing across the sand. To be a surfer in the southern part of the North Sea you have to be ready and prepared to be solidly skunked. We rely on a vivid imagination and freakish conditions.

Uncommon Ideals

The first breath is a beauty; Whispering of the north like a kiss Gilded hammer come tapping Licking the dun dunes Sweeping the tawny sea A chill fist come rapping At the doors of you, of me

Bay burn the first Runners of the dawn train Ripples, creeping in beneath castles Under dismantled factories Between oak groins tar black Onto reefs of hell And fain the eyes that track This first building of the swell

A copper peak like running snuff Bang, bang, bang From the north she pours Stirring the remaining cod Sister wind swung south Waking the Farne-bound seals And met by land she roars Dipped in sepia, flayed bister Delight for uncommon ideals

2. Chasing Flight There’s a moment at the close of Without Thought. Mark Dickinson, who surfs in the film, is buried deep in the tube at Thurso. A gull fights the staunch offshore and seems to hover. For a second the two converge...

Foil Gold Bittersweet nothing.

Licking the rotund geos Point after point Of flatness Another thousand miles To perch on Weary haunches and Watch the calm ocean murmur A little more weight Perhaps the changing tide Will change our fate Or it’s simply late Onwards, past reefs remembered Today unfelt by passing lumps Where the angry roar?

The thin mist Of the forecast swell?

The pattern lure Skipped out A bum trace, no barb in the hook You took me for a sucker, sea