The Ted Hughes I Never Knew...

A tribute to all the female journalists who've ever claimed to have slept with our late Laureate (and I may as well modestly reveal that I myself informed and inspired third clump of heather from the left in his penultimate Pennine poem)...


How oft I’ve climbed the craggy escarpment
Of the brooding North Yorkshire moors of your face
In my mind,
Careful not to tread on the nests of puffins
On the ledges of your brows
Disturb pipistrel bats hung underneath
Until, gripping the bracken of your hair,
I draw myself level
With your uppermost.
A mountain of metaphor
Could not begin to staunch the rivulets
Of my sharded tears for what never was!
I remember our bedroom tempests
As we fought to break through flesh barriers
To rub our very souls together
Defy nature’s boundaries
Like they actually happened.
My auntie saw you at a booksigning once
And my friend had a friend whose father
Once drove you to Royal Festival Hall.
I nearly came to see you read
Just before you died
But it was forty-five quid
So I didn’t
And now eternity separates us, my love.
Yet, I sense you are but a whisper away,
Close my eyes, inhale your peaty armpits still.
Seamus Heaney had nothing on you
Original son of the sod.
Master of the bog.
Hark, a hawksparrow at twelve o’clock
Bringing dead mice for us,
Or is he just, migrating…?

© LS King 2004