Fatally Wounded
Slowly, the clouds pass
Here where the leaves of this centuries-old Oak
Have greened, darker
From the flush green of Spring:
It is now mid-Summer
And I sit on the warm earth in this wood
Feeling
The Silence.
But there will be noise,
Homo Hubris,
When I descend down to where one road
Merges to another
While Sun, English-June hot,
Escapes the cumulus cloud
And the gentle breeze is Music:
These are Her instruments - this tree,
That bush; those birds.
And yet -
Such noise, such people
Where my world of walks sinks down
To that world which is not Her world:
There is no reverence,
There;
None of the silence that marks
Us.
But the morning was sublime as I walked
Feeling the red Sun rise
Where no cloud veiled the blue
Arriving as it arrives, deep and deeper
As Dawn merges into Day.
Now - late afternoon and homeward from work -
There is such warmth to sweat me
While I walk the steep tree-free track
To where the hill waits silent under Sun
Yet still whispering, wordless,
Of the three Orchids, rare, fatally-wounded
Who dry,
Dying
Their short lives, their beauty, taken
Crushed
By one of the many vehicles
Which here have scarred Her,
Fuming as they did with the fumes, the noise,
Of engines.
And tomorrow, as the sign says,
There will be a cull of Deer
Here
As Homo Hubris shoots,
Obeying orders
DW Myatt