Amidst the wooded slopes

honey-coloured waters trickle or gush

 - weather depending,

thru’ culvert, gully and ditch,

between piney-cushioned banks

and mossed, mini-falls;

down to the deeply slashed valley

where its young river, tumbles

over the rocks and rapids.

River Dippers dart and dash dainty-toed

from boulder to waters-side sedge;

a sentinel heron on one leg stoops

motionlessly over a rock-pool

-while the silence sings.

 

Since the Ice Age retreated,

grinding down the Silurian basalt

for the glaciers to drain,

this ragged ravine nourished

and harboured it’s own micro world

fed by a multitude of tributaries -

worn down to the bedrock:

gouged out by flood,

tempered by sun and drought.

The abundance of rain, on destiny’s rush

 back to the arms of the seas.

 

Badgers nose around in the leaf-litter

and wood-pigeons softly burble;

felonious cuckoos arrive

 from the mountains of the Atlas,

along with the garlic flower and bluebell

to depredate, with their parody,

of mothering and a call to besott the soul - to the echo of the woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tat and screech of the kite.

Bird babies topple from their nests

and buzzards circle over the canopy;

foxes drag lamb carcasses to their dens.

Bee, ant and beetle are undisturbed:

worm, fungi, minnow and frog

free-holders with their own devices.

 

When the foliage turns russet and ocre

and squirrels tend to their hoards,

sometimes intrepid deer

explore beyond their forest base.

Of ago, wolves would have followed;

and before the carving up of land,

tamed with fence, wire and road,

clearing of scrub and draining of bog

the native ponies might,

with the shorter days, have ventured

from their mountain pastures, for shelter.

An open, wilderness world

with Man, no more than a participant

as in the planet’s savannas, tundras,

backwoods and velds.

 

This small, remnant strip along the river

too inaccessible and steep for forestry,

too small and impossible to build on,

unserviceable for farm or mine:

a microcosm of what once was;

still secret, wild, untouched.

Only use to itself and it’s creatures

and the odd, itinerant forager,

artist, bird-watcher.