A mythic poem about the spider as architect, hunter and keeper of a tiny world suspended between darkness, dew and sky.
Now, the Silence Echoes
Now, the silence echoes.
Not the gentle hush of sleep,
or the quiet of a library,
but a long hollow hum.
Bouncing off damp walls,
unused plates on the table,
the dust motes dancing alone in a sunbeam.
It’s the echo of laughter
that no longer fills the air,
the thud of footsteps
that now only exist in memory.
It’s the space left behind,
a shape carved out of sound,
a constant, aching reminder
of what was.
The ticking clock is a hammer,
each swing a pronouncement,
a judge delivering verdicts
of loss and emptiness.
The wind whispers secrets
through the windowpane,
but they are garbled,
unintelligible,
lost in the overwhelming
dissonance of quiet.
It is a heavy blanket,
smothering the small, brave sparks
of hope that flicker
in the corners of the soul.
Now, the silence echoes,
a constant, unwavering presence,
a testament to absence,
a monument to what is gone.
Steve Halstead.
A penny
What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?
When I was seven I picked a handful of sand up that had blown off the beach
Rubbed my hands together and was left with a penny
I walked across the street with my parents put the penny in a slot machine and won ten pennies
The Sacred Things.
Not by the forge where iron learned its song,
Nor by the wheel that drew the kingdoms wide,
But by the hidden fire on lonely hills
The generations kept the dark alive.
The horn was blown before the cock had stirred,
The old oak heard the names no child now knows;
Bare feet had worn a holiness in grass
Where every wind remembered vanished gods.
The merchant weighed the silver of the earth,
The builder lifted towers to the sun;
Yet all their shining victories grew pale
Before one widow blessing broken bread.
For there are kingdoms fashioned out of smoke,
And crowns no smith has ever learned to cast;
A mother’s whispered prayer beside the hearth,
The turning of the year by sacred flame,
The old men lifting songs against the stars—
These are the pillars time has never felled.
The world believes that history walks with gold,
That kingdoms bloom where restless markets rise;
Yet every empire, clothed in splendid dust,
Has drifted like the thistledown of autumn.
Still, underneath the black roots of the years,
The elder spirits keep their silent feast.
They ask no tribute from the busy world,
Only remembrance.
For when the mills are ivy,
When iron sleeps beneath forgotten rain,
The child shall find, beside an ancient well,
A song older than sorrow, older than kings,
And know at last
That men are gathered into one people
Not by the wealth they leave behind,
But by the sacred things
They could not bear to lose.
Steve Halstead.
The hidden wheel.
There is a wheel beneath the hill
No saint has blessed, no king can still;
It drinks the moon from ruined years
And feeds on salt of ancient tears.
The falcon wheels, austere and high,
Above the ash that blinds the sky;
Below, the clerks with careful hands
Divide the bones, divide the lands.
They weigh the soul in coined despair,
They count the young, they count the bare;
They seal the dawn with plates of lead,
And crown the living among the dead.
Yet somewhere in the thorn and yew,
Where moonlight rots on leaf and dew,
A small fire keeps the winter through,
Remembering a bloodier hue.
For pride is not the trumpet’s blast,
Nor banners streaming to the last;
It is the heart that will not kneel
Though frost has gripped the iron field.
When all the maps are ash and bone,
And towers sink by their own stone,
The hidden wheel shall turn again
As it has turned through fire and rain.
Then let them write their brittle laws,
Their iron peace, their mouthless cause;
The stars keep older covenants,
The wind remembers pagan chants.
And those whom history left unnamed,
Who bore the dark and were not famed,
Shall walk beneath the yew once more—
Not conquered souls,
But shadows older than before.
Steve Halstead.
JFK
If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?
I’d go back to witness the assassination of JFK. I’ve been fascinated by it since I was a teenager, not just by the event itself but by the unanswered questions and conflicting versions of what actually happened. I’d want to be there, see exactly what happened with my own eyes, and then come back and tell the world the truth—whatever that truth turned out to be.
The Garden Where You Wander
The garden where you wander
Has long forgotten the rose;
The frail white thorn has ceased to dream,
The lily folds herself in sleep,
And every blossom knows.
For you have brought the autumn light
That all fair summers borrow,
The quiet grace that lingers still
When petals fall upon the hill
And roots remember sorrow.
The blackbird keeps his oldest song
For hours when you are near;
The ash tree bends as ancient kings
Were said to bow to nameless things
Half memory, half fear.
The wind that strays from distant fields
Moves softly through your hair,
As though it sought a vanished age
Or turned some lost prophetic page
It could no longer bear.
No hand can keep what time desires,
No heart outlive the years;
Beauty is but a lantern flame
That leaves the darkness still the same,
Illumined by our tears.
So let no foolish pilgrim seek
Bright flowers beneath the sky.
They bloomed before the world grew old,
And all their tender fire and gold
Have gathered in your eyes.
Soon evening’s silver veil will fall,
The paths be overgrown;
The garden will outlive us both,
Yet wander through its ancient growth—
You shall not walk alone.
For every leaf that leaves the bough,
And every fading star,
Will speak your name into the earth,
As though all beauty knew its birth
And followed you from worlds afar.
Steve Halstead.
Between Ticklepenny and the Two Churches
I came to Ticklepenny Loch
As though I had been summoned there,
Not by the road that crossed the fields,
But by a voice beneath the air.
The water held another sky.
Clouds drifted under reed and stone;
I could not tell which world I walked,
Nor which one called me as its own.
The sedges whispered names I knew
Before my mother gave me mine.
A heron, motionless as thought,
Stood keeping watch on older time.
Then something loosened in my breast.
The weight of bone, the pulse of breath,
Became as light as thistledown
Escaping from the hand of death.
I watched myself still walking on
The winding path through ash and thorn,
While I moved on another track
Where neither dusk nor day was born.
The fields were full of unseen folk;
Their footsteps stirred no blade of grass.
They neither beckoned nor forbade—
They only waited for me to pass.
At Alvingham the churches stood,
Not built of stone but listening light,
Twin keepers of a single gate
Half hidden from the mortal sight.
No bell was rung, yet all the air
Was trembling like a spoken prayer.
The ancient yews unstitched the years;
The dead were breathing everywhere.
One church remembered those we were.
One held the selves we might have been.
Between them flowed a silent stream
No waking eye has ever seen.
I crossed it without moving once.
Then all the birds forgot to sing.
The earth dissolved like autumn mist;
The stars bent low in widening rings.
When finally I found my feet,
The loch was only water still,
The churches only weathered stone
Upon a quiet Lincolnshire hill.
Yet sometimes, when the wind is right,
I wonder who came back that night.
For something older stayed behind,
Still walking where the worlds entwine.
Between the water and the towers,
Where death and dreaming intertwine,
The dead still whisper through the hours—
And call the living back through time.
Steve Halstead.
Pain
Who are you most inspired by?
How people that are so much worse off than me and are clearly struggling with a lot of pain and bad health.
They inspire me because they usually suffer in silence.
And just try to make the best of what they have.
Until Even Darkness
There will come a day the wind
Will speak my name without a voice,
When every road forgets my footsteps,
Yet still remembers where they led.
Do not search the empty doorway.
I have only changed my weather.
The stars have always hidden
Inside the wounds we could not mend.
When your hands can hold no future,
Hold the silence just the same.
Every unanswered prayer
Is still a flame without a name.
Become the thing they feared in you:
The heart that would not harden,
The river carving through the mountain
Simply because it must.
Pour every hidden season
Into the soul that does not flee.
Love is not what leaves us breathing—
Love is what survives the breath.
And if the night should close around you,
If every light forgets to burn,
Listen—
I am there
In the weight that keeps you standing,
In the grief that teaches mercy,
In the dust becoming dawn.
Walk on.
Not because the world deserves you,
Not because the ending waits,
But because somewhere beyond the silence
The universe is learning
How to speak your name.
Until the oceans lose their memory,
Until the sky forgets its blue,
I will be the unseen current
Bearing all that once was you.
Carry on.
Not away from sorrow,
But through it,
Until even darkness
Learns
To call you
Light.
Steve Halstead.
The Things That Refused to Be Bought
They told us progress came on iron wheels,
On ledgers balanced and factories lit before dawn,
That history bent beneath the weight of coin,
And every village yielded to the city.
But I remember other kingdoms.
The Sunday bells that stitched the fields together,
The smoke that curled from every chimney
Like old prayers finding their way home.
Hands that knew the language of harvest,
Voices that measured time
Not by wages,
But by swallows returning
And the slow greening of the hawthorn.
The old men carried stories
As naturally as walking sticks,
And every child inherited
A map drawn in sayings,
Superstitions,
And songs no one had ever written down.
The baker knew your grandfather,
The blacksmith knew your grief,
And weddings gathered the whole valley
Until laughter rose above the fiddles
Like birds escaping winter.
Perhaps the economists were right.
The mills grew taller than the church spires,
The roads grew straighter,
The trains outran the horses,
And money learned to travel
Further than memory.
Yet somewhere beneath the tarmac,
The footprints of dancers remain.
The wells still dream of ribbons,
The hedgerows whisper forgotten names,
And abandoned chapels hold
The echo of a congregation
Who believed the world was held together
By neighbours rather than markets.
So when evening settles upon the empty lane,
And a single blackbird rehearses
A tune older than any empire,
I feel the stubborn pulse of things
That refused to be bought or sold.
For history may be written
In the language of kings and commerce,
But the heart remembers differently:
It remembers worn flagstones,
Bread cooling on a windowsill,
The smell of wet wool and woodsmoke,
And ordinary souls
Keeping ancient promises alive
Long after prosperity had passed them by.
Perhaps that is why nostalgia hurts—
Not because the past was kinder,
But because tradition was once a quiet gravity,
Holding scattered lives in orbit,
Until we mistook movement for belonging
And traded inheritance
For speed.
Steve Halstead.
The Yorkshire Poet & Friends 