Crich Stand

A tiny light in all that sea, gone five seconds
and twenty seven years. One hot July
past chucking-out, we stepped not very drunk
from the Duke of Sussex, six of us, and saw
the landlocked lighthouse. Twenty miles. And set off
there and then to walk all night the White Peak
ups and downs of chevronned lanes; the sky
so very close, so many stars and wishes,
names of constellations over charcoal wheat,
and fingerposts, galleon trees, unseen cattle
lumbering, then a fox that looked through us
and strolled on. In time we stopped, six of us,
somewhere in Derbyshire, where the tower swung
exploding eye-to-eye across the drystone fields.
At seventeen, who needs Dr Freud to say
...