Lockdown

This country's "Poet Laureate" - appointed by The Queen is of course a Yorkshireman. He's called Simon Armitage and he is from the village of Marsden near Huddersfield. Reflecting upon the COVID 19 lockdown he has recently written a poem for our times called unsurprisingly perhaps - "Lockdown". In this poem there are echoes of previous lockdowns - one in "The Plague Village" of Eyam in Derbyshire that I know very well and another way back in legendary times in The Himalayas. 

At the parish boundaries of Eyam you can still see special stones with recesses in them where quarantined villagers left coins in vinegar to pay for deliveries of food from neighbouring communities. The Plague arrived in Eyam in a roll of a cloth from London. Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre were young lovers separated by that particular lockdown back in 1665.

Here's the poem:-

______________________________

Lockdown 

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream of infected fleas 

in the warp and weft of soggy cloth by the tailor’s hearth 

in ye olde Eyam. 

Then couldn’t un-see 

the Boundary Stone, 

that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes, 

thimbles brimming with 

vinegar wine purging the plagued coins.

 

Which brought to mind the sorry story 

of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre, 

star-crossed lovers on either side 

of the quarantine line 

whose wordless courtship spanned the river

till she came no longer. 

But slept again, 

and dreamt this time 

of the exiled yaksha sending word 

to his lost wife on a passing cloud, 

a cloud that followed an earthly map

of camel trails and cattle tracks, 

streams like necklaces, 

fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants, 

embroidered bedspreads 

of meadows and hedges, 

bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks, 

waterfalls, creeks,

the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes 

and the glistening lotus flower after rain, 

the air hypnotically 

see-through, rare, 

the journey a ponderous one at times, 

long and slow but necessarily so.