Hot, this sun while it breaks
As I sit quite still
Beneath cloud
On a white bench watching
Flies spiral for shade.

My head is at peace
While the body waits
In this Park
Where each shade of Summer green
Becomes real in this light
And trees speak, slowly,
Of their fears of being
Half alive:

Around
The chanted tuneless hymns
To the god of Noise.
I met this god, once:
I was young, inexperienced, while he
Tall and unspeaking
Glowered
Pointing to the deaths, the madness,
He had caused.
And I: I smiled, a little sad,
And walked away to seek
The human warmth
Of love.

For years, a war in my head
While I saught to find
A dream:
She was never real, my dream

But there was magick, I found
In sitting silent
While beams of Sun become filtered
And fractured through leaves:
A joy in watching while clouds form
And break, casting
In their myriad ways
This Sun's gift of life.
There is ecstasy in walking
High upon hills while wind cries
Or thunders:
No suffering, except hunger,
While I wait for my Dark Daughters
Of Earth;
No pain of dreams destroyed.
 

Now there is rain to make me
Take up my sack and walk
As a wanderer in creaking boots
To where the Spirits of my waiting Woods
Will sigh:
Without his dreams,
He would be nothing
And I shall smile while, hot,
The Summer Sun breaks briefly
To dry my rain-soaked back

Bands of cloud draw colour
To cross then curve
Then block this Winter's blue.

It is appealing, sitting by a tree
While moving air moves
If only slightly
The lane-side sleeping weeds and grass.
Above, a silent battle
As high air masses collide:
But it is still, here where I sit,
For no vehicles pass
And only hunger reminds me to move.

No pressure of Time,
No routine to know:
Only a knowledge of the bitter weather
Waiting, to come.
There will be starkness, again, in the dark
When I shivering shall curl
In all of my clothes and wait for warmth
By walking
At Dawn.
And there shall be no songs of birds
No smile:
Only a wish for warmth, a wife, a home;
For there is sadness in remembering
The sadness my selfishness caused.

But Art is in the sky, above:
Always changing
And I like a drunken man
Sway
As I drink the elixir in.
I, a moving Thought
Living suspended
Between Her twilight and what may be
My own coming Dark.

Every impression is creation
Along The Way:
I cannot die
But only change this soil-bound form
As a river from rain-cloud grown.
 

The sunset is solemn:
Iridescent clouds prism
A Solstice sun;
There are the crows twisting black
Against blue forcing the Kestrel
Down.
Each silence is solemn.
 

I had thought of challenge,
Sleeping as I lay witching
Within the forest hut: there would be
Sport, the challenge of each Time
That left no one to answer
The unasked questions from each Age.
I would ask each day for its beneficence
So I alone could keep silence
The way the Mage kept each year
His vow;
There would be sadness in solitude,
An image carved of Man
And each Winter would fashion my face
With lines
The way the Kestrel kept its prey
Despite its crowd.
 

I was stirred, each week,
With endurance, keeping meanings
As though all silence was an answer
For all time:
Each Summer found me tired
Inured as I was to water
Chilled by my stream:
There was always something that kept
Me strong while I carved my gifts
With life

Berries on a bush
A solemn Solstice sun

So many years wasted, polishing
Each gift.
It was no use - I tried to sell them
Through the market of my words
Until, cleaned - with
The wise man's beard, the warlock's smell,
The sunken eyes of sleep -
I left those streets of Man.

For I was a stranger, too late for gods
Too early for empathy,
Wasting away from words
The way each city, each town, wasted time
Among streets
Controlling anything that was loose
Or looked of life:
They were lost
Trapped between sounds which saught
To satisfy a lust and deeds
Which defied death
Until disgust became divine
And divinity disgust:

There was nothing noble left
Save the safely sanitized recordings
Of a past that kept a certain balance
Between the profit and the loss
Of each new fashioned faith.
There were words - no truth;
Actions - but no path
And each leader defined a goal
To satisfy demand.
There was no clearing
As there were no ways
Inside their wood
Each tree defining limits
For their life.
 

He remembered when there were no cars
And when the cherry handle of his hoe,
Five feet long, was smoothly new
Fifty years gone
In those days when he would climb
To hill-top field to sit leaning against
The Great Oak while Summer's clouds made shade
Ten miles distant on the high curving hill above the cold cottage
Which bore his birth:

Then, it was good to lie beyond the half-hour
Allotted to eat, to rest, as that day when cider-induced sleep
Kept him restful in leaf-shade warmth until annoying flies
Woke him.
But there was no one, for miles - no boss to scowl - and he was free to stretch
To return to wear away the cherry handle of his hoe
While larks rose as larks rose, singing high
In the heat of Summer.
 

But now, breathless, he stoops, lee-hill wind-sheltered
To lean against the fence and view
This valley of his birth.

There, the farm, smoke from two chimneys rising,
Where each early morning he arrived for work,
Walking the short lane miles from home
Where his mother, then sister, kept house
And cooked his tea, and where he slept, awakened,
Set off from,  returned to, every day of every year
Five decades past.

There, three hill-folds and two lanes to the left
And older than his great-great-great grandfather's settling family
That warm, welcoming Inn which for fifty years has seen him
Evenings after work.
 

There was a barmaid, once, he briefly courted
But May came, bringing new blood to the town beyond
And she left to leave him walking, sleeping, for two days
By Great Oak while the contents of three flaggons lasted.
He went there, once, twice, to that town.
 

But now, cold, wind-dried, he calmly views the valley
Of his youth, his life:
There, the memories
When few cars came.
But now, now town-ways spread, growing as houses grow in the distant village
To the right
Bringing as cars bring a changing to this life.
 

And there are only dark clouds, and the cold rain of damp Winter
To cover the quiet remembered Sun of youth.

Even here, the river of noise can be heard:
Even here aside the copse atop the hill
A thousand feet above the road, two miles distant,
Whose vehicles carry their captive beings rushing
To another journey.

From here, the Marches hills - snow covered -
Quietly wait while all kinds of being
Pass, cover, crawl upon, despoil, enrich their soil:
Knowing as such hills do through their rearing, breathing silence
The passing that is every being's death.
So they wait, wordlessly waiting,
Breathing

While high in the pure, bright blue above
Sleek machines of silver streak the sky
But briefly, with white:
I cannot hear them as they, that way, then back,
Carry their captive beings rushing
To another journey.

So there is a mask, here, to mask such traffic noise,
A tree space where warming sun bears down
As I - dead branch for pillow - lie among an Autumn's gold
While sun warmth warms my hands, my face:
And so I hear the quiet dream of hills
Who, wordless, waited,
While roads came:
Their breathing a connection to another machine-less Space.

Is it pride, the illusion of knowing more than we know:
Our false if certain belief that we can, must, change what is
Because what will be, might just be better?

Is it such things, such ways, which upset that natural balance
Of life leading
To suffering?

For there is only that living which accepts
The land, the sun, the weather, the toil to live
Drawing nourishment from Her soil:
Too fast, this modern machine-city life
Where we no longer dwell amid the slow changes
That slowly break from this planetary tilt and turn
Where we live balanced between sky and earth
With feet, only feet, to carry us slowly to only where
We have a nurtured need to go,
Out, out, among the small ancestral space
Of a land which is our home.

Instead, now, that manic pace constrains, conflicts,
Providing only an unconnected passing
Between our beginning and an immature end
Where we do not know, do not feel, Her slow nurturing love
Renewed each warm Spring, each Summer's heat,
Gift of our nearest star
Whose essence, as a father, made us.

Instead: we kill, we strive, are proud to know,
Preening ourselves at the mirror of Destiny.
There is thus no straight evolution, no upward living
To the thinking, dwelling, where our Earth is but one place, one home,
Among so many
And we centre ourselves between our darkness and their welcoming light.
Instead: we continue to kill that which we cannot create
Blessed then cursed by Her gift of Thought,
Unable, unwilling to grow as trees grow, rooting themselves
In Her earth.
 

Nearby, chainsaw-man sets about the hedge, the tree, with a will
Killing what he cannot create:
But it is only one small, one more, Winter space
Home to a myriad things;
There is no thought, there, of Winter berries food for wing-borne life:
No thought of insects waiting on Winter's end:
No thought of buds sleeping, waiting, for Her warming wake-up call:
No thought of tree alive as he lives:
Instead, there is killing, striving, the pride that knows.

Snow, hill-whitening, while a cool sun journeys
Slowly
Beyond the cloud
That touches the Mynd in a slow dance
Of beauty.

There is a moment, of youthful hope:
A Thrush to descend down to pick
The storm-red berries from a grey-green tree
Of holly
Stout, strong, from more than ten-score sun-warmed
Summers.

It is the twilight time, of life:
There is no music, no painting, no books in preparation
For this
As if the labours of those who artfully laboured
Went unremarked, misunderstood
Thousand year upon thousand year:
Few seeds sown, as berries sow new life.

Yet I heard them call out, once, often, in a dreamful youth
When hilltop viewing at night beneath
A night of stars
Knowing no difference because I had yet to learn
As adults learn
To constrict the flow of Thought:
One individual, striving, among so many
With so many needs
To feed the flow of life.

All things, if in their treasured smallness, bring a remembering
Of the empathy which is our own evolution
Of life.

Warm sun after weeks of rain
And I am free to lie on my coat in the long grass
While, around, a world continues
Needless of my help.
 

So many mistakes, lessons,
Yet I almost am as I was before
Ready to stab forth into darkness
Hoping to slay whatever lurked
Just beyond
A boundary of comprehension:
Shadows, fleeting, glimpsed.

Whose the son, whose the daughter
Injured, maimed, suffering: killed?
But I - we - had to strive
Since we believed in such striving
Needing as we did to know:
It was only assumption, artfully, lovingly, moulded
To assume the artful appearance
Of fact:

So much suffering, so little
Learnt.
 

There: trees, grass, seeds, growing
Needless of my help
While, two miles down, a drying road
Conveys constricting cars
Joining so many illusions so crassly moulded
To thrawning spawns:
Just who drives,  who, the driven?
For there are others ready, waiting, eager,
To stab again the dark:
 

There, above the sky,
Where stars brighten our darkness
Beings wait
Watching
As we slowly stumble
From infancy to youth.
 

---

It is so simple
He heard the wanderer say
While he lay sleeping in sun
Propped up against the fence
On hill-top field:
 

There was the image, the sound,
Of that valley stream which years ago
Had often drawn him down from where Corner Lodge
Lay, a whole century settled, beside the bend
Not quite half way
Along the steep heather-strewn hill
And where he, his wife, their cats, enjoined some years
Of restful life
Before his selfish self dishonourably sequestered
Such happiness
Away.

Yet it was warm, this February sun,
And so he dreamed such peaceful parts of his past
Until his wanderer spoke
Again:
 

It is so simple to live as we can live
Settled and focused on only what we see,
On only where we can walk on one day's
Walking.

But clouds came, covering, awakening
Because warmth went
And he - aching from his half century of life - rose
To descend down
To where no one
Waited.
 

Yet there would be dreams, his dreams,
As he sat at night, cold, before the fire:
His dreams, never quite believed,
Of warm times when a woman would once again wait
To welcome him
Home.
And they would smile, as he - she, they - had smiled
Bound in warm wordless love.

So he sighed - well over half sad -
Because he knew now
As the calling buzzard, the grass, the trees,
The very earth around him knew
The living silent knowledge
That grew as grass grows green
In sun
 

These poems first collected under this title on JD 2452463.37881
Copyright DW Myatt