WHITBY
Feel, between the illuminated harbour arms,
what powers of life and death have passed – still pass.
Watch – through that whalebone arch below the
captain’s memorial statue – how the east cliff displays
charged ruins:
relics of the abbey of St Hilda – the Mother….
Whitby! – with its jet, its whipped silvers and soft golds;
its one hundred and ninety-nine steps:
where cowherd Caedmon, after one vision,
became an estuary of song;
where Lewis Carroll, strolling on rhythmic sand,
rehearsed “The Walrus and the Carpenter”;
where Captain Cook unfurled his need for
expansive dreams;
where Bram Stoker, absorbing the same force as
Caedmon, Carroll and Cook, dwelt compellingly on blood;
where fisherfolk, with mended green and orange nets,
continually ply between the Esk and Northumbrian sea.
Copyright © JENNY JOHNSON
