For John Steel
I charge you with the afterlife of that moment.
Return periodically across your life and see us
(you in your second decade, me my fifth) still paused
at the gate between Snary Beck and Mockerkin How.
See again the white horse on the fell, the light
gilding its tail as the wind flickered.
We’d passed Snary Beck, Cogra Moss
was behind us, and I thought the animal’s poise
as beautiful as anything on earth.
But it’s our pause, the instinctive accord of it, and the light
which must also have been in our hair,
I now find (shifting my gaze) more beautiful.