The Clarion House

Hand built on a hillside, people’s Pendle palace.

Place for Edwardian evangelists.

Shuttered stronghold.

Reticent revolutionaries.

Local liberals and a Socialist choral choir,

whose crescendo makes Clitheroe club cyclists cleats clink,

as they dance on wooden table tops and tile floor.

Night Jays jig in a tempest of temperance and

Marston Moor mercenaries march to the beat of a Burnley barbershop quartet

singing ‘Here Comes the Sun’.