Thoughts in a Welsh woodland

The Autumn sun filters through the trees and butterflies dance in its light. Leaves appear motionless until one, as though imitating the butterflies, flitters to the ground, feeling obliged to fall because today is the first of September.

Somewhere in the stillness of it all, birds call to one another and a squirrel bounds from branch to branch with comsummate ease.
Beyond the field a brook babbles because that is what it is supposed to do, making smooth the stones as it swirls around the corner it has carved out, leaving behind its ripples to prove that it had passed this way.

Close by in Salem graveyard lie Davies, Edwards, Howells and Williams, the slate headstones of their tombs at one with Nature, their wrought-iron surrounds leaning as though weakened as hosts to the ivy.

Incongruous obelisks of polished marble, products of more recent times, stand on the higher slope commanding an even better view of the landscape, as though in a theatre's more expensive seats.

Come the dusk and the woodland bats know that it is their time. They unhook themselves from daytime beams and flap about, their dark cloaks silhouetted against the opaline sky.

Ullswater

Craggy, Cumbrian mountains
Secure in their immortality,
Skirted by birch and willow
Unmoving for want of a breeze.

The ewe lies watching her lamb,
Tail quivering like a catkin, it
Scrambles onto the rock and
Poses, before tumbling down again.

The waters of Angle Tarn
Come rushing, falling, telling the same
Ageless tales, they join Coldrill
Past Hartsop Fold, on to Patterdale.

They flow into the lake and,
Sighing upon her shores, they shimmer,
Then, with Sleep, lie glass-like, still,
Until Narcissus has his mirror.

Winter on the Solway Firth

Scots pines etched against ice-blue sky,
Sunlit sheep mirrored in the mere,
A flight of geese honking overhead
Blackbellie mountain sleeps for another hundred years.

At Dundrennan, the abbey's ruined walls,
Silhouetted against the light,
Conceal the fantasmas of bygone monks
Awaiting the shadows of the night.

Smoke from chimneys over Palnackie,
Boats shelter in the bay.
If I should die tomorrow, - no matter,
For I have seen it all today.