Becomings by Tim Taylor

In this place was a lake, where the rivers once came

with the soil they had scoured from the mountains above.

Here they joined, became still and relinquished their load,

so their brown, rushing water became blue and clear

and the pine trees grew tall by the wave-caressed shore.

Over time, those same rivers, the rain and the ice

ground the mountains to hills and the hills into plains

and the water was filled with the dust of their bones.

Then the trees and the rivers all faded away

as the lake became mud, and the mud became stone.

Underneath, the old earth gave a shrug in her sleep.

The plain was now folded and thrust to the sky

and the sandstone laid down in the lake that had died,

made from dust of forgotten hills long worn away

would be moulded like clay into peaks of its own.

And of course, there is rain, there is ice, there is snow

and the flesh of the mountain is bitten once more

by the streams that emerge, like the sweat on its skin,

that will swell into rivers and flow down its flanks

and the valley they carve will be filled … by a lake.

Yorkshire Writers' Lunch