A poem on Malvern Hills and a tragic death.

I’d like to share a poem based on the evocative landscapes around the old spa town of Malvern in Worcestershire, England. I was first drawn to this place as the burial site of Charles Darwin’s daughter Annie. The great scientist had hoped the legendary curative powers of the natural spa in the town could heal his seriously ill child, but alas, she died here not long after arriving.

Her grave in this ancient place, surrounded by the peculiar and incongruous Malvern Hills, towering over a mostly flat landscape, had an effect on me that I struggled initially to articulate. I wrote the following poem as a way of processing this.

Malvern Hills

A citadel of green burnt seep
it does seep into the history
of all the county, and Wales too.
Wales would deny it, but that’s fine,
it does have mountains that tower over
Malvern mine, this hill
I saw once and just

had to have. Oh, maybe twice.
The first it was snow luck
wiped like sign-gesturing
into lilliputs and boundaries
by a wind that made your ears
hurt and your chapping lips
bid bye

to the warm inside.
Darwin’s dear little girl
would soak here once too, unsaveable
from gene pool… no that’s cruel
put a sock in it. The bolt spine of the hills
is touched by millicent feet of us
the second time.