City sky and country hills

The lure of nature grows in its absence.    
A lost love hurts more than love delayed.    
Mine I surrendered. Its recapture    
Showed the full spectrum of what was missed.    
   
A country boy, at first by the seashore    
And then entranced by meadows, paths and woods,    
By hills and streams and with all that moved there.    
Even my university abutted    
The Alice in Wonderland river bank.    
   
As a man I embraced the big city.    
Who could make a life and future elsewhere?    
Yet city suburbs are the no man's land,    
A transit camp with a daily release    
Onto claustrophobic buses and trains.    
   
In central London, ambition achieved,    
Only to find that hub was a desert    
Of nature- tamed domesticated    
Vegetation in its manicured parks,    
Water birds as exotic decoration.    
   
Nature did fight back. Starlings would take roost    
In hundred in the trees of Leicester Square,    
Their nocturnal conversations drowning    
The human noise of the entertainment    
Centre of London- until the trees were felled.    
   
Yet there was one element of nature    
Which turned these arrogant humans into    
Inconsequential specks of dust.The sky.    
Let in when clearing the smog, the people    
Then tried to exclude it with their buildings    
And by their night time blaze of glaring light.    
   
In one place, the sky triumphed in its    
Immensity and variety.    
At Waterloo Bridge, to the east St. Pauls,    
To the west the Houses of Parliament,    
Faded into structures evanescent    
The sky had forgot to obliterate.    
   
That sky changed from day to day. Benign or    
A threat, imperious or spectacular,    
No wonder it turned the song "Waterloo    
Sunset" into celebration and not    
The usual hoped for or dreamt of.    
   
In the end, I could not resist the pull    
Of that tangible nature which brushes against    
The cheek. In the Calder valley and its    
Enveloping hills, trees and plants and    
Birds and mammals are within touching distance.    
   
The bleak grandeur of its hills had inspired    
Reconstruction by Emily Bronte    
Of human relationships with nature.    
The valley was home to more recent poets-    
In life, Ted Hughes. In death, Sylvia Plath.    
   
The salute to the warm immediacy    
Of the valley leading onto Bronte's    
Depiction of people liberated    
By wild beauty is a continuum    
Completed by the sky of Waterloo.    
Perhaps the best way to comprehend and    
Not be shackled by the natural world.