So many cloudy, rainy, windy days

but this one was champagne

from piercing breakfast to golden evening meal.

Where clouds, somber, dark against sycamore green

reflect warm evening light, the mauve in pure Payne’s gray.

On and on the brown and weedy river flows

reflecting foxgloves, meadow sweet and buttercups,

an endless ribbon in my mind –

printing out these visions, memories of the past;

sweet as wild honey suckle, sharp as nettle stings.

The first hay mown and in fat windrows lays.

Corn sprouts in rows; raked from the sky.

Barley leans a feathered head and sings –

of the sea with waves of mottled green.

Dark verdant wheat whispers in fluent fields.

The beauty of the poem, poppy strewn –

And we, in our small steel hull are pulled along

a ribbon wound in Natures hair,

reading the text of meadow, wood and mere

in weather wild and wet or balmy warm.

Untidy larch, a shambles of limbs, awaits the fall

to show, in gold, the value of it’s hidden wealth.

And oak his mighty branches leans,

to mourn the passing of the wooden hulls;

planks of oak and soles of vanished elm.

In open reaches, Bulrush, belfry tall;

lord it over lowly Celandine and cowering vetch.

While Bracken, phoenix of the woods and heath,

reaches for the light, from last years burnt out stems;

flocks of green static birds rise in the mystery of another year.

And were all mankind to vanish, the worlds true soul

would flourish in a golden age of peace.

This moment lost; a mere splash of ink

and all of us but dust to drab the bright green leaves.

 
 
David Garlick, Wales, June, 1999