Saturday afternoon on the Ridge

I was doing some research on a new site I will be using for a Forest School project when I came across a reference to a poet who had written about the wood. I wrote to her and she has sent me a copy of the poem. I think it may even inspire the children in the older groups to write poems of their own.

Saturday afternoon on the Ridge by Lucy Newlyn

The wind is up – raking beeches,

stirring low among alder branches,

and bending the spindly trunks of birches.

Clearings are islands of traffic sound

blown up from the long grey

trailing ribbon of Meanwood road.

That disused bandstand is bleak

and marooned as a winter pier.

Out here, where the trees end,

wind buffets the sledge-slope,

thwacks the broad flat face

of Ridge terrace like a cliff.

High over house-tops,

gulls tumble and cry – circling,

circling in the empty air.

Here all the ginnels come to a stop.

Land falls away. Sugarwell

is folded in distant greenness,

and Meanwood has been

far out at sea all day. 

The poem is in Ginnel (Oxford Poets, Carcanet, 2005)