Two Poems

HIGH COSTA MILL

In the last year of great Elizabeth,
my ancestor John Hood from Pickering
wed Miss Marshall of nearby Wrelton Hall;
got as dowry the mill on Costa Beck;
put down roots in the flat wide countryside
on land limed with the bones of Bronze Age men.
The line he founded milled the local corn,
then flax, then corn again, and dressed a flour
that sold, father to son, father to son,
three hundred and fifty years and more,
the name, High Costa Mill, its guarantee.
'Yorkshire-grown, Yorkshire-ground, you have our
         word,
John Hood and sons, millers. Founded sixteen-o-two.'
Their day is over now, the family gone,
the wheel immobilised in silent tomb.
...