There was this palm of veins. The palm rolling in fisted the coal gravel soil till it hurt.

The hurt was greater when they could not squeeze the earth, could not place each foot ahead and above the other, pinioned by the gust.

When the glacier came she was not even a gleam, a mote. She could not even be said. Nothing was waiting.

Now the stretch-marks cut into every rock show her said; her weathering the tunnel; panting, muscle clenching sweat, spine arching, fainting head or tail into the light at the exit, at the entrance, coming towards and in her.

And she stopped and thought if I go any further

I shall die but the anxious hand behind her prodded her in the back, delivered her, posted the bloody bundle into cold hands in the morning before work, lying there on the mat, on the door­step of a small rolled stone cottage in

the village of Dent, Dentdale, Yorkshire

Copyright Paul Brookes from ‘Rats For Love: The Book’, published 1989