DOWN THE VALLEY AND BACK
The Towey practices its slow, bright curves.
From a distance watch indulgent, guiding hills.
Coaxed to soft mudded shore, the quilted morning
And a pearly sea, we are a downward drift, and aimless.
Caught up in salt breeze, its notions taught by brick cliffed roads,
The red deserted, bleak-eyed, stuttered cities,
Crouched and stripped of worth and hard work,
Neutered by bigger plans, a thrombosis of roadworks.
Unformed, uniformed, scrubbed up, led away
To an anaesthetised future, one size fits all, a shabby lie.
—
The world is bone and snowdrops
A sketched slope of towsled brown.
Fields pressed down and drowned in pools,
Mired and marred.
Scribed by hawk the white grey sky,
A scatter for crows.
—
The Towey dives back
To its deep, delved loins,
An upper silence reconstituted
And holy, disembodied,
Become mist and dew,
An older language,
Petalled lilt,
A catalogue of sighing valleys,
Wooded oak and ash,
Forgiving and lean,
Slowly choired and gathering voice.
Skywards ( the distant sunlit views),
Scrubbed of green, a whiter shade,
The rain-washed road.
—
simonhlilly 