Poetry

Monday, 2 October 2023

Mountains

Mountains are like nerve bundles tied up in knots

Tense packed strings of wires fossilized, baked

Bended, frozen

But before these feeling times of tumultuous floods

And bruising, burning, tortuous

Moments had been forgotten

They survived as eviscerated rocky facades

Flakes of time millimetres thick only

Lain down like rings in a tree

Buzzing in the Nerve tree

In the roots of the bundle of the body of the land.

Red Burn

 Down from the dark, titanic mounds

Runs the Titans blood

Sometimes white as milk

Sometimes dark brown

Dirty blood from its deep arteries

Over salmon flesh, over cod yellow

Over the red Wrasse fish body

That heaves in the Glen

Whose gills breathe rain water

Whose lungs are damp caves

Whose Leviathan mass lies

In these watery graves

 

Whose back is a whale- une Roche Baleine

The whale bone ribs have been bent into waves

Whose oil and blubber are buried deep underground

And ambergris in its gut are the minerals yet unfound

They’ve been hunted by Geologists with their hammers like harpoons

Ready for the conquering like men who want rock from the moon

River

 The river babbles, shelves in clam-like semi-circles

These C letters it is spelling out

Constantly, clattering, changeling

Calling in chains

That run like white sausage strings

Over stone rails

Bulbous and fat as onions rolling

Down a cobbled hill

Chattering and chasing each other as children do

Racking and racing as horses out the stalls

All from the starting line over the head of Steall Falls

Dragon Fly

 Little beastie

Fearsome in is proud mantel

Scales of multi-colours

Wings of thinnest hair netting

Squashed so its guts spilled out

Trodden under foot of exploring geologists

In their rush did they find the rock was still there?

Did they try to squeeze Life out too from that?

Like blood from a stone

I don’t care

Skin and bone and hair that is where life is

We are like hurricane hunters chasing after

Something that is already dead

This is red, that is not

Time is not dead though

Time ages and we can only remind ourselves of by how much

Of by how unimportant our lives are by looking at Rock

Hard, never blinking, always staring no matter what

Rain gets in its eye, 

Like Heroes of the old world

They survive or don’t quite out last everything

Slowly decaying eroding

 

She held this fledgling in her hand

Like it was more precious than all

The Rocks of time and the world

As a giant holds a seed

Or a mother her child

That they know will grow into a flower

Then upon a rock she placed it

Ticking, for the seconds of its life

And let the fairy nymphs of the river

Have its body

Path building or making ends meet

Here we are all sat down

Amongst the turf that’s turning brown

By the stream which fecund flows

Over rocks in rows and rows

Here we stand beside each other

Sister to sister and brother to brother

Beside the mountain

Beneath the cloud

The echoing falls which talk so loud

A new line

 Monads, epistles, fevers, colds

Cool drooling mouths

Faces of fools opening, closing
Laughing and falling
Like all of human nature
Into the gene pools

The River out of Eden
The long charade
The pictures and shadow play
The aching archipelagos
Abandoned island rock
Out on a precipice
On its own a ticking clock





















The sum of all our fears

 Will you create a lasting world?

Will you dry our tears

Will you ensure life for every boy or girl

That's the sum of all our fears

That's the sum of all our fears


Are your eyes seeing, what our eyes see

These visions of hell and heaven not free

Will you close the book and just let it be

While the water boils down in the sea

That's the sum of all our tears

That's the sum of all our tears


With your finger on the buttons of a warhead

Will you press the red button marked send

Will you let loose the dogs of war unlead

Like the fossil fuels that have come to an end

For that's the sum of all our fears

That's the sum of all our fears


There wasn't a dry eye in the house

When the film of Earth ran off its reel

The director was as quiet as a mouse

But you could hear every producer just squeal

Will you ask mother nature for a refund

Saying I thought we had a lifetime's guarantee

She said look son what you've made me do

It's because of you that I had to roam free


So I stare in the mirror like a mad man

And ask myself what am I going to do?

Just wait for death here in the badlands

Where the dry winds are blowing their due


Shine a light in from outside Lord

For this house is going into the shade

And we're sitting beneath a hanging sword

It's one that's only man-made


Let us be judged by a court of our peers

Let the hammer stroke beat on the gavel

For this is the sum of all our fears

For our fears yet have a long way to travel