HEARAETH by Michael Docker

He went home - always said he would -
from the low flatness of forty years;
an even keel career, neat garden
Hard won from grey clay,
the steady house upon which
sun and rain had fallen with
no relief from a mountain's shadow

and the children; Rees, Rhiannon,
wearing their old names like badges
of a club to which they did not belong.

A Midlands hospital had done its worst by him
for years, left him at sixty with a chest
patterned like a farmer's hillside -
stones, a ransacked carcass; old bones.

So he went home. Took his valley wife
Back to the valleys to a small estate
snagged behind a miners' terrace
like a Shrike's catch on wire,
ready for some kind of future.

Went back for the mountains, and the
call of home ringing bells in his blood.

"It was the hills," he said to me a year on
back in the flat zone, in his new breeze-block-
built house in a square of bare clay.

It was the hills.
Forty years had left him gasping for them.