Moel Siabod

Peat marsh: an extent

the irregular beat threads
and spreads out under foot

What is it there?
That old mud and sleepy oil

The secrets
against clocks
crackle

Rot yellow grass
burnt pieces
of far away

Sheep shit
rounded in
small beauty clusters

The incorrect trees
happen barely

and the stones clicking low
are almost forever

How the skin of lake mid way freezes!

one blurry
curving line

There were once small fires
in Quarrymen's barracks

Now the ravens
intimate here
flying and hidden
kissing behind rocks

upside down darkness
jagged     feathered

no warning cawing
but talking with each other
coming nearer

They were as blacke 
as they might be

South east spur
path markers lost
burning
steel
snow

Our human foreignness coats

The summit we didn't make
leaving us

True animals now skirting
and delighting

Scrambling down with
gloved hands in the snow


This poem is in many places dependent on the observations of the Wooden Girl. Often, she looks and delights while I march ahead or the camera organises my vision. The scene is Moel Siabod, the Mountain (I will call it a mountain) that can be seen in last week's photographs.

This post is for

The footpath to Moel Siabod

In the sixth and seventh photographs you can see the remains of the Quarrymen's barracks. The rockfaces are scarred by their work in a number of places (that vast pile of abandoned slate is theirs); these scars show up as part of nature's scene now.