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Purbeck Progress

Paul Hyland

Salt mists creep on the sunlit hills
as if the sea beyond reclaimed
its own pure chalk whose calcined bone
under cropped grass is Purbeck’s spine,
ocean’s upswelling laid-down dead.

Below are clay-scapes, gravel troughs,
relicts of repe ous seas’
transgressions and retreats; the waste
acidic health whose flagrant furze
like yeast, works in the sun’s oven.

Furrows, like ripples in the rough,
struggle from farmsteads, and revert.
Seawards, ramparts raised on the chalk,
strip-lynchets, stones chart human des
while mounds like sea-marks compass them.

Those barrows of trussed bones disperse
in mist up on the chilling ridge.
The humming heath lies undisturbed;
men se led on the sun-baked earth
that soon must break over their heads.

First published in Paul Hyland, Purbeck: The Ingrained Island, Gollancz, 1978,
Dovecote Press, 1989

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