Writing

the cigarette smoke fades softly into the dark and humid night along this ridge in Penn’s woods– making my memories of flat Ohio landscapes and golden rolls of hay disappear, dissolve and drift upon the strong and swift Allegheny

via Adrift — spanishwoods

Summer day on the hill

A short walk out on the hill today

Making my way up the country lane

A mile and a half there and back

The Ash trees are weighed

With bundles of samara

The rowan berries

Filling beginning

To slowly change

To that bright orange

Hawthorns stacked

With umbles of berries

And the beginnings

Of that red blush

That will fill thrushes

During winter days

And oaks show

The small green acorns

That will fill and grow

And squirrels and crows

Will feed on them

When days turn cold

And the old crab trees

On that wet lane corner

crowded with tiny

red tinged apples

An old tree fallen

Lies on its side

With an eye watching.

RAC

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.