Writer and broadcaster GP Taylor has submitted the following poem.

He is a New York Times best-selling novelist. He writes fantasy fiction and spends most weekends and many weeks writing in the southern Lakes.

A film of one of his books is on Sky and Amazon films and is called The Adventurer, The Curse of the Midas Box and has an all star cast.

He can be followed on twitter at @gptaylorauthor

He said he wrote it 'after having 'a beautiful weekend in the Lakes' and then exiting through a Cumbrian town.

 

Monday morning in a Cumbrian town

Grey slates,

wet like dragon scales

rest on dark stones

windowed and doored.

A nowhere town

of fat women in thick tights

with delinquent brats

that dangle from their fingers

like broken street lamps

They trip, tramp

to the market place

where a fish seller

offers them Hake

from the back of a van

where every Monday he stands

as cold rain washes cod skin

from his nicotine stained fingers.

The kids blea

t as they are dragged throug

damp streets

weather washed with

autumns first flood.

The sentinel tick tocks

and chimes the hours

a fine town clock

etched with names of the noble dead

that only on one day in November are read.

Ignored with eyes of those who pass by are Boothby Bentley Craven Coal Lives no longer remembered in the morning as the shop keeper wipes the bloodied knife on his butchers apron having sliced a steak of salt marsh lamb grown and grazed on the grave where the slave boy sleeps.

And on Faraday Road

they trudge to school

aged teachers with lessons learnt

Who dream of making geniuses out of fools and building cathedrals from broken bricks.

Cyclist speed by

Old men in skin tight Lycra

Panting on pedal irons

Of gossamer carbon

Sprinting out of town towards

the barricade of Pennine hills.

And still, as the town wakes

One by one cardigan clad shop assistants open doors towards the empty town And the road leads in and the road leads out But no one stops.