Out on the mountain watching the rain move in
From the Severn Channel thinking I was caught
Walking boggy ground on the old Miskin Estate
But I stood still watching as the rain grey shroud
Passing me by covered the dim domed lower hills
I found myself listening out there to the wind blow
Soughing its sighs through the conifer plantation
Blasted and flattened by a New Year gale that felled
The woodlands on the hill tops and frosted high slopes
So that in the morning it looked as if a battle or war
had broken out while we slept off the New Year party
It was a scene of desolation walking through forests
Like some Paul Nash painting of shattered Ypres trees
Fifteen years later the trees have still not recovered
The walls of the estate built to enclose common land
Have fallen too and are now used in places to make paths
Where the land is wet and poached by cattle hooves
But although these long dry stone walls have tumbled
We have different kinds of walls built to close us in
This relentless psychologised industrial consumerism
That inflicts its message on the first day of a child’s birth
You need, you want and you can’t ever get enough.
In the “White Goddess” Robert Graves wrote that poetry – “Once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born….it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in science, philosophy and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family.” (From The call of the wild: Paul Kingsnorth The Guardian Essay Saturday 23rd July 2016).