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Lancashire Times
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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
1:03 AM 11th January 2025
arts

Poem Of The Week: Waiting For Spring By Robin Hargreaves

Waiting for Spring

No song rides on the chill breeze this morning
and the oak and hazel keep their buds tight,
tucked up their sleeves like tiny hands.
I’m counting the impatient days with only the nodding
snowdrop to show for winter’s end.
It can’t be long until the bracken uncurls to breathe the
wild garlic and the bluebells play their blue notes under
the wind-borne curlew’s call.
And we can say nothing really dies as the green world
unfurls to sing its summer song.
And the sun paints everything in colours brought down
from winter’s attic once more


Photo by Illiya Vjestica on Unsplash
Photo by Illiya Vjestica on Unsplash
Retired veterinary surgeon Robin Hargreaves was brought up, the son of a farmer, on a tenanted holding in Malhamdale. Spending his childhood observing the landscape of his native valley and the panorama of hills that rise in all directions around it, he acquired an easy affinity with the passing seasons and with the subtle hues that hint at the presence of change and growth.

His sensitivity to his own unique terroir, that leaves marks others not similarly exposed would miss, emerges, here, in a heightened awareness of the iron ache of equinoctial transformation as the land begins to creak and groan into new life. ‘Waiting for Spring’ is an impatient presentiment, a desire for the succeeding season to be revealed, as the poet’s narrator renders the old terrain, and the promise of the new, in seductively persuasive metaphors.

A poem of real beauty in its simple song, Robin Hargreaves’s homage to this Yorkshire dale is as clear an affirmation of indebtedness to place, as it is a de facto acknowledgment of the value of poetry as a concise and distilled means of expression.


‘Waiting for Spring’ is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.