POETRY

Land almost encompassed by salty waters,

the Wirral’s peninsula is bounded by

the bird-thronged Dee Estuary to the west,

to the east, the Mersey Estuary

with memories of famine and slaves,

and on its north coast –  that stretches straight

as a nautical ruler from Hilbre Point

to Perch Rock – Liverpool Bay, the Irish Sea.

 

Tradition has it that the Wirral begins

two longbow arrows fall from Chester’s

Roman walls, the city where I write.

There were Viking and Saxon settlements,

their place names surviving – Thingwall, Irby,

Eastham, Moreton. Nelson’s Lady Hamilton

was born in Ness. The carrier Ark Royal

was launched at Cammell Lairds in Birkenhead,

the place of Wilfred Owen’s schooldays,

and one of the first towns to raise a Bantams

Battalion – a thousand small men destined

for slaughter. Port Sunlight was the self-made

Lord Leverhulme’s fiefdom of soap works,

art gallery and war memorial. Some

of England’s poorest wards are in Ellesmere Port,

a town canals and oil and cars created.

 

There was the ‘wyldrenesse of Wyrale’; wooded,

shallow valleys between low sandstone ridges,

north to south; at its base, a narrow valley

formed by glacial meltwater run-off –

from what would become the two estuaries –

that made Wirral a proper island

until the silts of time grew copses and farmland.

 

This almost island of my imaginings –

wild thoughts: settlements razed, burning;

the dead unburied under charred beams;

lost orphans, in their thousands, wandering

the ruined fields – not very far from here,

barely two arrows fall.