About This Poem

Surprise View: A Place Where Memory and Meaning Meet

I wrote Surprise View after visiting the spot on Otley Chevin where we scattered my Dad’s ashes. It is a place filled with ordinary life — walkers with ice cream cones, dogs bursting out of the cocksfoot, young couples drifting along the trail — yet beneath all that movement sits a quiet gravity. The poem tries to hold both at once: the everyday and the sacred.

The martial boulders, the skylarks, the sweep of bluebells, the benches that line the path. These details came from walking the same route again, noticing how the landscape feels protective without being solemn. The chosen seat, the willowherbs rising above the heather, the sense of saluting the ground where he rests. That moment stayed with me.

But the heart of the poem is the view itself. The treeline parts, and there it is — the red brick house where my Mum moved after he died. I usually lean on coincidence rather than divinity, but standing there, looking from his resting place to her new home, it felt impossible not to sense something more. The poem sits inside that feeling, not claiming it, not explaining it, just acknowledging it.

It is a piece about connection, about landscape holding memory, and about the strange comfort that arrives when two parts of your life quietly align.