Ranges of vertiginous mountains Banked in serried steps, loom close, Held from smashing down the slopes By a line of credible wooded hills. Hilly summits brushed with backlit mist. Trees, naked on the bronze-flaked earth, Standing like abandoned Guardsmen, Gradually dissolve into veils of light. Diffused by cloud, the sunlight smothers, Covers the forest with a blind blanket, Muffling the senses, shrinking perspective, 'til dead trees and leaves are all we know.
Updated: Dec 31, 2019
Emerging from a dream of France
The miles still present in my legs and arms
But dimly, like another's pain, it seems
I am betwixt, stuck, half my mind adream,
The other nudging now, the real.
I know I must awake, but past-wards reel
To that corridor of struggle, joined in time and place
With all who over centuries won or lost the race
'gainst gravity, the clock and nagging voices in their heads,
And legions who through time have offered succour and a bed
Or coffee with the sweetest kindness in the cruellest night.
We rode with anciens by our side, their torches' light
Our guide and inspiration. Their struggles ours, their fight
To conquer self, to immolate the doubt, ignore the pain,
Is ours, and if we only try, begin, commit, we gain:
A child's helping hand,
A poly-national peloton,
A thousand "Bon courage!"s
Lifelong friends from 'étrangers'
Sweat, sun, rain, wind, chance,
Beauty, pain and the best of France.
The darkness of tree shade, cooling summer wheat
The darkness of forests, lovely, still and deep
The darkness of a raven, on blue a void in flight
The darkness of the lowering clouds, dripping dying light
The darkness of a winter's night, beyond the flickering road
The darkness of a lonely town, warmed by a friendly word
The darkness of serried hedgerows, concertinaed by the dawn
The darkness of Knapweed, suspended in the Meadow Brome
The darkness in my heavy head with home beyond my reach
The darkness of a friendly wheel, drafting me home to sleep