(Leaf 10) – Looking Back
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| St. Mary's Church, Harrow-on-the-Hill. |
This poem is about a memory I have of walking to school on my own one cold winter’s morning. Crossing a bridge, I remember looking over the brick wall and seeing a view of Harrow-on-the-Hill at the end of the railway tracks. Framed by the leafless trees on either side of the railway embankments, the island-like Hill was a familiar sight. But that day, the distinctive silhouette of the tall, pointed spire of St. Mary’s Church* rose up in a clear white sky. Behind it was the perfect circle of a pale red sun, glowing weakly in the milky stillness. It was a serene moment of perfect silence. I’d not yet read Byron’s poem, ‘A Distant View of Harrow’, but in that moment I think I felt something akin to how he did when he saw something similar. The Hill was a central part of my life growing up. A place synonymous with home, burnished by the memories of friendships which forged us when we were young, when the horizons of our world were much smaller, though at the time – they seemed so vast.
A
pale
round
red
sun
serenely
rising
in a
perfect, milk-white sky
– seen afar, high on St. Anselm’s Hill,
the tall,
slender black spire stands: silhouetted.
*St.
Mary’s Church, Harrow-on-the-Hill in Middlesex was consecrated in 1094 by St.
Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109.
