Introduction to: The Path of the Hare.

Introduction to: The Path of the Hare, a poetic work by P.J.Allsop.

The brown hare is my totem animal. It is difficult to understand why I chose this particular creature to become associated with, but it appears somehow I was drawn to it, fascinated by its existence. Since childhood the sight of a hare darting across a field or a heath has sent a strange and mysterious shiver down my spine.
Above my home, on the side of the moor, the edge is dominated by a sweep of scattered woodland that marches like a troop of weary ancient warriors across the landscape. The gnarled beech, oak and Scots pine lean away from the open moor and boggy terrain, contorted by the ravages of fierce autumn and winter winds. Their trunks are generally lean and thin and their branches twisted and spindly like something from an Arthur Rackham painting. There is no undercover, just rough grass and sedge. There are deep dips and hollows and a beautiful gritstone drystone wall, with specially constructed small ‘creep’ or ‘cripple’ holes for game to pass through. The wall built long ago with patient skill is now tumbled down in places but still acts as a boundary actively dividing the open moor from the wood.
In early spring and summer the wood and surrounding moorland are home to a variety of hardy birds including curlews, a dwindling number of lapwings, meadow pipits, skylark, Mistle thrush, tribes of common finches and tits and on occasion a fine redstart. In the rough grass or sedge beneath the trees a woodcock may be hidden in silent solitude blending into the sparse cover like a chameleon. On warm evenings or the dawn of the day it may be seen roding on owl-like wings above its territory. During the autumn and winter month’s boisterous brambling, fieldfares and redwings from the harsh north seek sanctuary among the trees. Starlings and wood pigeons too often gather in flocks smothering certain trees like strange winter fruit.
This is the land of the raven and its kin, the kestrel, the merlin and the buzzard: it is also the path of the hare.
There are of course other places to watch hares round the area, they might even be more abundant there, but somehow to see hares on what I regard as my own patch is a significant almost spiritual, symbolic happening. I, like the Pagan Celts, still view the brown hare as a sacred animal of spiritual significance. This view was held by Caesar and backed up by the discovery of a strip of thin sheet bronze from a Roman well near Winterbourne Kingston, Dorset, with the outline of a hare punched on it.
Caesar maintains that the ancient British did not consume the flesh of the hare deeming it a valuable animal for divination: the direction that a hare was seen to run could reveal important omens that could possibly alter the course of events. Indeed he tells us that Boadicea released a hare before leading her army into battle against the Romans. Some modern day pagans, particularly goddess centred, honour the little known earth-goddess Andraste, who according to the annals of Roman history was associated with the hare, and it was to this deity that Boadicea released the hare. This goddess is also linked with fertility and the Spring Equinox, when day and night meet on equal terms. At this time the hare maybe seen to frolic in the fields, the Jack hares jumping and boxing and it is perhaps fitting to view the hare with the coming of new spring growth, a time when Jack-in-the Green begins to stretch his limbs.
It is thought that the brown hare has roamed our land since the Bronze Age, arriving in modern day Europe too late to cross by the land bridge but somehow finding its way to our misty shores. It certainly out-dates the rabbit, that was probably first brought to England by the Normans and reared in manmade warrens as a source of food. The brown hare is larger than its indigenous relative the mountain hare and does not change its coat to white during the winter. The mountain hare is a native of the Scottish mountains but isolated colonies are to found in the Peak District if you know where to look.
To regard a hare in silhouette up on the edge, is to see a primeval looking animal that is both constantly alert, intelligent and in many ways strangely noble. Its large eyes appear to miss nothing but it relies also on sense of smell and its acute hearing. It is a solitary creature by day becoming more sociable after sunset.
The brown hare is a creature of habit. It has favourite paths to follow which pass through certain exits, holes in hedges, gates or gaps in a wall, maybe a ‘creep’ or ‘cripple’ hole. Poachers may try to take advantage of this situation by ‘netting’ familiar exits or gates. If the hare is lucky enough to escape this tactic, it will be wary in the future and never use those exits again. In the wood I have found paths, given away by the soft ground, which lead to their favourite feeding grounds. To explore the Edge after a fall of snow is very exciting as animal tracks lead this way and that through the trees. True to form a procession of tracks can usually be found tracing the hares’ path down to the rough pasture.
Jack hares have nothing to do with the rearing of the leverets, leaving this job to the doe. The doe is a bold mother and has been known to defend her young against weasels and stoats, kicking out at the pernicious hunters with her powerful hind feet. The leverets are born above ground fully furred with their eyes wide open. They quickly move off a safe distance to a form, a place where they can remain hidden in a thick tussock of grass or a stand of sedge. The doe will visit them, usually by night or when safety allows, to nurse them. In this way at least one of them may survive.
I believe the mainly solitary life of the hare enhances its sense of mystery: a lone nocturnal wanderer loping through the shadows beneath the cold luminosity of a pallid moon. In folklore the tale is told that the hare sometimes stares up at the moon all night as a labour of love. For this kind deed the moon goddess grants the hare fertility. The thought of a hare mesmerised by the light of a full moon is an intriguing one and invokes fantastic visions, for in many parts of the country the brown hare has acquired a sinister reputation as an animal of ill-omen or as a witches familiar. Its habit of sitting upright and its human-type cry may have helped to enhance this notion, either way it certainly adds the animals sense of mystery.
It said by some pagans that if you see a hare you should be cautious. I believe that if you see a hare you should think yourself privileged.

The Dreaming River

At the edge of my sight
Ripples unfurling the foretold morning
Sunlight ancient and cold revealing the alien shapes
Sliding between sky and smooth rock
Like dragons wrapped in perfumed myth.
Clouds scurry by dipped with ink
Gazing narcissistically into the thin water.

Stones drown in winding weed
Alder trees wheel through the fish-eyed ghosts
Who haunt the fringes where winter ice
Only days away held firm.
The shattered glass of frozen silence
Stilled to stone, holds our breath to its bosom
Like some dreaming river goddess
Lost in time, unworshipped now
And fading like ochre after the storm.

Confused bird prints like thrown runes
Scatter the shore with riddles,
The river has taken their meaning
Cleansing chasten thoughts to the idle watcher.
The sweet breath of river beasts, lingers
Still, whispering in the stiff grasses
Marking time and tide with infinite tolerance.
The heron, snaked-necked and laden
Abandons the river to sweep the reeds
Feather on feather as soft as dream
As the serpent searches for the salty
Tears of the sea.

Meanings.

I stoop to find meaning in rocks
To trace patterns in their shape,
Their ring and cup markings,
The tree of life etched into their surface.
The permanence of their existence.
Makes me feel fragile.
I am surrounded by pagan stars
Flickering and dancing
Like fire flies in the night;
I feel as free as a dragonfly
That hovers on the edge of the universe.

I gather petals into pictures,
Twigs and stones into complex patterns,
Capture sunlight from rushing water
In the palm of my hand,
And lock away the memories of bees
In ancient honey jars.
I stalk spirits like fish under a bridge;
Their blue tapered shapes elude me,
Because they are made of tears of light,
And like meanings they slip into the shadows
And disappear.

I walk into the valley
Through strange sunlight, carrying
An old tin box full of ancient treasure:
A string of pearls, a photograph of a young woman,
And a young man in army uniform,
And a poem about a father lost in the Great War.
The tin is buried beneath an old oak
Among delving roots and rotted earth.
This is not a grave but a place of no meanings
A sanctuary of thought and broken spells.

Sacred Stones.

 I feel rooted to the spot
Hewn from stone
Chipped and shaped, and smoothed
And rounded, perhaps into
A millwheel, to grind corn or wheat.

This land engulfs me, folds me
Into its great monolithic arms
And stands me on it windswept plains
To be worshipped, to be danced round
At mid-summer sunrise.

I tower through the mist and defy
The crashing waves at my feet
My head full of seagulls clamour.
History scrapes its runes about
My body, carving myths in stone.

I am a stone cloud rising from an ancient
Sea, the haunt of peregrine and raven,
A home to holly and yew.
The tree of life adorns my spine
Cup and rings to riddle the hunter.

I wear the landscape like fleeting shadows,
Forgotten time is no mystery to me,
I am the millwheel that turns time to dust
Sets it to the wind and scatters it
To the four corners of the universe.

I am the one you name but do not know,
The time honoured ghost in the misty landscape,
Born from fire and ice, set before the sun and stars
To mark the heavens and mirror the planets
Of your minds eye.

When I was a Child.

When I was a Child, childhood was forever,
there was no end in sight, no conclusion,
no distant station at the end of the line:
but a darkness lingered on the edge of my world,
like a cold chill beneath the door,
tainting the beautiful vision
with cracks and fissures of obscurity.
But I endured, and strangely,
those potent days in the summer-drenched fields
keep close reality, and the grass
still feels silky to the touch
and the sky today is blue with dreaming
and the insects drone a song
of infinite understanding and timelessness.

When I was a child, I chased shadows
through streets of borrowed dream;
I walked the hills and woods
to escape the darkness:
I touched trees to life and loved sunlight
through veins of pulsing leaves,
and ladybirds like red dots on the sun.
I roamed valleys that hummed with past voices,
where streams whispered poetry
as the evening cast its cloak.

When I was a child, the sun shone brightest
on those gleaming meadow days
when secret kisses tangled with buttercups,
and girls were scented with enchantment,
rolling in the soft satin grass of the meadow.
Mystery stalked the musky air
and days were golden with promise,
a treasure-trove of innocence,
of apples unbitten and fruitful expectation.

When I was a child, the clouds were huge and billowing,
the sky curved into infinity
and the earth filled our universe
with no room at the edges.
The days crept by like a lazy stream
and we tumbled through life
like Fidler’s Lum,
the secret waterfall beneath the willows,
only to emerge from the tumult
strangely changed, burdened with the weight
of adulthood and the seriousness
of gazing unblinkingly into the future.

Tangled in Words.

Up on the hillside I hear them
snaking amongst the gnarled trees
like some crazed dancer,
reeling to a fiddler’s tune,
earthbound and star-struck,
crazed on moonbeams
and drunk on sweet starlight.

At first they whisper
like hare’s breath on the cusp of dawn,
a light breeze sliding over polished flint,
laughter among the crisp beech leaves;
then they gather into a chant
reciting spells and makings and imaginings
that cause the clouds to weep
and the sky to moan with longing.

I walk on the edge of the wood
and listen with hunger
to make sense of the web of language,
the tangle of words and syllables
that assault my senses and cloud my vision.
I await the wise man to solve the riddle
of ages

but all I hear are rustles, and creaks,
the groans of old trees and the breaking of buds,
the whispers of silken grass and the heartbeats
of creatures lay hidden in the copse.
I read the chatter of finches
and the sigh of a moorland breeze
brushing the feathers of a hawk,
the surge of ripples on a peaty pool,
the heaving of fossils in the old wall -


I walk on.

The Pool’s Edge.

On the edge of the pool, the birds
are like statues, then there is movement.
The flick of a tail, a long, curved bill
probing the rich mud for treasure.
A single feather, curved, white as a snowflake
caresses the surface of the green water,
drifting aimlessly, then spinning wildly
as if cast adrift in outer space.

The curlews arrived by moonlight,
reading the night skies like mariners,
stroking the stars with outstretched wings
echoing ancient song like the star-born.
The pool’s edge somehow seems
fulfilled by their presence, and
the moor beckons like an old friend.

The small party of long-billed snipe
take off with zigzag flight across the water,
diving for cover in the spikes of sedge.
Among the lapwings that patrol
the shallows, their flamboyant crests
giving them a musketeer appearance,
a lone golden plover stands proud
puffing out its black summer finery.

Out on the water a goldeneye still lingers,
but soon spring will urge it to journey home.
Grebes tread water in age-old ritual
and swans plough the rippling water
like strange elfin boats. Teal that somehow
mark winter on the pool, sweep by like arrows
to be engulfed suddenly by the reeds. Mallards
dabble, upending in unison, while the crested
tufted duck and pochard dive beneath the dark
water to bob up later like corks.

The pool is a place of transition,
of fleeting shadows and footprints
devoured by seeping water and oozing mud;
a world within a world, a sacred enclave
bathed by seasons and claimed as sanctuary
by the secret herds.

The Duck Pond.

This is a place of shadows and silence,
A place of dreaming;
A realm of perpetual twilight
Where time meets itself
And claims sanctuary
From the outside world.

Here I played the naturalist
Sitting beneath a Scots pine
Soaking up nature’s secrets,
Losing myself to the drone of insect voices,
And being hypnotised by the silent ripples
That gathered fragments of old sunlight
In their wake.

Once I was frightened by a host of slimy frogs
Who emerged from the primeval ooze of the pond
And crawled onto to land as if for the first time.
I ran back to my grandmother’s cottage
And slammed the bolt shut in its socket,
But I swear I heard Evolution scraping at the door.

One day I found strange hoof prints beside the pool
And a scattering of flower petals: Pan I believed,
Had frequented this wood,
Had piped ‘til dawn to an audience of owls,
Then like music stolen by the breeze,
Had faded back into the warmth of myth.

The still surface of the Duck Pond
Would often shimmer with an oily sheen,
Like the reflected iridescence of a starling;
The stillness often startled me to thought,
To dream in the shade of the green canopy
And trace the shafts of escaping sunlight to infinity,
To search the sleeping shadows for meaning.

Archaeology

We went to the old Brickyard
Bronte and I
In search of the past.
We turned stones
To reveal secrets,
Rolled over decaying logs
Where shimmering
Green beetles scurried.
We were not searching for the Grail,
But for signs
To bring past and present together;
To find order in the chaos.
Bronte, only eight years old,
Poked and pried, dug and scraped,
Letting the past lives of others
Fall through her tiny fingers:
Shards of brown earthenware,
Fragments of blue willow pattern –
Perhaps the Sunday best –
Buttons and glass bottle tops,
Small medicine bottles,
Bits of broken clay pipe,
A red brick with Buxton
Stamped on it:
All were seen as treasure,
All were important
To a young child’s mind.
Perhaps the lip of an orange bowl
Had belonged to great grandma Sharp?
The slender cream pipe stem
To great uncle Wilf, discarded
As he laboured in the Top Garden?
Then stooping, Bronte held aloft
A badge encrusted with age,
A small blue shield
Once worn with pride.
Did this once belong to my father?
Notts & Derby Sherwood Foresters,
A badge he carried
Through five years of campaign.
My brother once playing games
In Grandma’s Wood, lost such a badge.
Had the token
Sought a granddaughter's hand?
My father never lived to see
His youngest grand child,
But perhaps past and present
May still embrace
In hallowed ground.

Muckle Flugga.

I’m stood on the end of the world
Watching the gannets wheel and turn about dark
And sinister rocks, huge slabs slipping
Into the turmoil of sea.
I strain to see the lighthouse keeper’s
Ghostly form, to hear the whales singing
Of elder days, sagas of the sea
And dreaming horses.
I balance here on the edge of reason
Conjuring dragons and ancient mist
Like some soothsayer casting the bones
Onto an endless shore.

The sun will soon be engulfed by waves
And the raven greet its maker,
The loon will call on the dark waters
Of the Loch of Cliff,
And the evening gulls return to roost:
Then I will turn my back on Out Stack
And embrace the peaty track once more
And tramp the wilderness way,
Remembering the sea mist
And the gliding sea-mews
That haunt the corners of my thoughts.

The Cycle Trip 1974.

(A Poem for Derek. R.I.P.)

Farewell old friend,
No more will French fields pass by
In the blur of the moment;
The ranks of sensuous sunflowers
Beckon like flirtatious village girls.

We conquered Europe, us Musketeers,
With our indomitable nature,
Freewheeling into uncertainty
With open arms and minds
And an inquiring spirit.

We embraced its green forests,
Struggled up its snow clad passes,
And finally stood atop its mountains
Like shining beacons for our generation:
Music filled our life
And the lust for life swelled our hearts:
But above all, ‘adventure lit our star.’

We gazed down on the colourful patchwork
Of earth below, and for a fleeting moment
Life seemed eternal, and we believed
The precious music would last forever,
A sustained note vibrating through the universe.

The festival of life we believed
Would go on forever, reeling and rocking
Like those hedonistic days in Montreux,
But cruelly the show does not go on forever,
The visions gradually become misty,
The colours begin to fade in the sunlight
And the music is swallowed
By the vastness of it all.

Yet deeds remain solid, locked in stone,
And visions once dreamt cannot be erased
Even by the passage of time.
So farewell old friend, until we all meet again,
Because for every dying star, a new star is born
And will shine so hard.

Heron.

Star-eyed fisher king.
Great winged god,
Rippling the water
With a motion
That stills my eyes,
Filling the pine-scented air
With unsung promise.

In that moment
The land is stirred
Into motion;
Hypnotized reeds
Their feathered heads swaying,
Dance to the rhythm
Of mighty wing-beats.

The wild ancient cry,
The reflections of primeval
Forest on the oily surface
Of the great marsh,
The multitude of echoes
Ringing to be heard,
Falling through time
Frozen forever
In shimmering amber.

Stars.

As I looked out of my window on the world
The stars were glinting on the shoulders of the hills,
All was quiet in space, at least in this mute part of the galaxy.
Sleep was no nearer than the bright star on the horizon,
Balancing on the outline of the trees like a lantern.

Now I’m in the wood sat among the frozen silence,
The snow is crisp and white, stardust, coating all things
With the coldness and dispassionate touch of space.
The winter thrushes are perched in the trees,
Their cries are harsh and they talk of the north.

There is relief here in the cold, no pain,
No visions of destruction, no death by bombing,
No ranting and raving about religion, no
Disputes about who has the right to own God:
No destruction or murder in his name.

As my mind deserts my body, like my breath,
White and steaming, I see the owl in the tree,
His dark beads penetrating my very essence:
Has he come for me? To take me across
The dark river, to guide me through the void?

It is then I yearn for the stars, cold and distant,
And the northern star bright with friendship,
Glowing like a beacon of hope in a sea of shadows,
The lighthouse keeper of my soul, mapping
My intensions with familiar certainty.

Swallow Tales.

The swallows sip the morning dew
And snare spider webs as keepsakes,
A net of memories to keep tucked away
When darkness seems to rise.

They stroke the dancing heads of faded
yellow grass
Sending seeds in a flurry.
Their chatter is urgent and excited
And marigolds catch-a-fire in their wake.

They tell stories of burning hot deserts,
Locust swarming black as night,
Oasis and ancient trade routes:
Camel trains and mystifying scents,
Of long forgotten cities buried in sand.

They tell of jungles screaming with strange noises
And rivers raging over fathomless, cascading falls;
Of clamorous birds the colour of rainbows,
And fierce cats with eyes of yellow fire.

It is then I wish to hold the swallows
With invisible thread,
To keep them close like treasured memories,
Lock them away in my head forever.
As they gather on the wire, their tribe
Increasing as the sun sinks low,
I groan for their passing
And yearn once more to hear their exotic tales

Lud’s Church.

Cracked sky and the winding stair,
A womb opening, the name in the rock,
The trees arching like fingers painting the sky.
The cloying smell of earth, of dripping moss
And ferns clinging in epiphytic disorder.
Descending into the past, into the chaos
Of superstition and beliefs, of omens,
The shadow of the cross dancing
On the sheer walls, where fragments of sun
Steal the darkness: the fortuitous path
Of the comet across the night sky,
The toadstool beneath the birch,
The cowed monk staring into the abyss
With inky pen.

Down the worn steps to the chapel in the green,
Into the sacred locus of the Great Goddess,
Where whispering oak leaves flutter
And the holly broods green and dark
With blood red berries shining as jewels:
Here for a moment savour the ethereal stillness
And breathe the air of chivalry
And revel in the wildness of pagan
silence.
Decipher the runes etched in stone and tree,
For here Hob and Herne brush the bilberry
And weave the toadskin spell about them,

As a cloak of swirling stars and old moons,
Long ago waned, their light yet trapped
In rune-like cracks and crevices about
The chanting gritstone chasm.

This is a holy place:
A sacred enclave beneath the sky,
A chapel full of curlew song,
A place of swirling hallucinogenic dreams,
Of ancient echoes and secret meetings,
A place where you confront yourself -
Your shadow,
Deep in the earth:
But when you step out on the purple flowering moor,
To the twittering and sweet lark song
You empty your head of visions and dark dreams.

The Song Of Gaia

Sing to me of trees
Venerable and cracked with moonlight,
Sing to me of gliding streams
And the reflections
In the eyes of owls.
Sing to me the poem
Of the shadow hunters,
The hind in the thicket,
And the final sacrifice;
Or the kingfisher
Sliding passed my eye
Like a beam of ancient starlight.

Sing to me of restless seeds
Rocking in their shells,
Of sighing willows
And sleepy voles,
And water weed
Spread like dancing shadow.
Sing me the flight of the hawk on high
And the racing wind
And talons reaching for the timid mouse.

Sing to me of blessed smoke
And sunlight through the oak leaf,
Of dragonflies like rainbow arrows
Or soft rain on the lips of dawn.
Sing to me of sacred stones
And the dance of life
Of spring and the green bough
Of my lord and rebirth:
Then sing to me of sanctuary
And the hallowed ground.

Toad Stone

Rising on the skyline, cold stone,
A toad crouched in the landscape
Watching the traffic snake across the moor.
This is a sacred rock, perhaps always was,
A watching place, perched on the corner
Of the world, balanced on the cosmos,
Quarried by wind, rain and time’s ruthless hand.

I see a hunter through the haze
Stood on the rock, a slender figure,
A worn hazel shaft in his hand,
The sun sliding off flint,
Eyes piercing the ancient shadows
Like a nocturnal being, every movement
Monitored with lizard-like precision.

Is he watching me? Through the shimmering
Haze of the moor, stained purple with flowers
And ringing with hypnotic lark song,
Does he observe my progress
Up the Old Road? Through
The red-veiled dream, can he peer
Through time and space, The Hunter,
Gazing down through all eternity.

I wish to reach out and touch his mind,
See the land untainted through his eyes,
Hear the hum of creation, the poems
Of calling and murmurs of making
In the stones and trees: I long for
The feel of the primeval wind on my face
Like the smoothness of flint,
To taste his freedom like wild honey
And dance the dance of ages
With the bees and beasts
Above Toad Stone.