Category: Landscape

Mast Year

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

So many fell this year
They formed a levee
Down the road crown;
Skittish squirrels 
Drunk on the urgency 
Of boundless foraging
Bound and leap
In arching acrobatics
Over bark, along leaf,
Forcing the fruit into freefall
Dropping like stones
Tropical rain
Brushed off surprised shoulders.

And as the wind whips
Whorling through the laden canopy 
Boots below crush and crunch them
Kicking up a bow wave
Of desiccated oak fruit
Before
Caught in cleat, 
Lodged in a turn-up
Tramped down the path,
They turn up far away;
Dropped off-handedly
Between a rusty tango can 
And a lost, sodden mitten, 
To rise, rise anew.

Olive

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

Ten arms’ round the olive tree was;
Fifteen feet tall;
Hands down, the oldest wood
This wood would allow.

Knotted and knurled the bark was;
Creased and crimped,
Folded and furled,
Hidden eyes looking on, unblinking.

Silent and sentinel its watch was;
Tirelessly gazing, sensing
The ebb and flow of days
Passing, impassively.

Rich yet stolen the harvest was;
Blackest of birds,
Bitterest of fruit,
Taken whole, its future set.

Scorched and charred its crown was,
Wind-fired, flame-licked,
Blackened and smoked,
Yet, from ashes, new beginnings.




The Orange Train

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

They built it for the oranges,
Bulging with sun,
Dripping from the trees;
Small plots, tessellating up
The stony slopes
Tangy with lavender and thyme
Bright globes of colour,
Between the scrub olive
And holm oak drabs.

Ambling from the City,
Cars and carts clatter
Away, avoiding
The unblinking eyes
And plague bell, tolling;
Over the dust-bowl plain
Desiccated sleepers
Grip Spanish steel tight –
The wooden train
Grumbles its way slowly up
Under sparking gantry.

Breathless,
The escarpment squeezes in
And, as it does, remembered voices
Of tunnellers, wielding
Sweaty picks, barrows, chisels
Echoes through the cuttings; then
Darkness,
Before the bursting
Glare flares forth –
Down, over rock gardens,
Half-caught peeks at encircling peaks,
The shimmer of the azure port
And the orange-gold richly won.

Cape

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

The road grips the hillside
With tortured fingers,
Chalky-dry, like a climber’s hands
Precipitously feeling for the hold;
Side-winder snaking,
Along the dragon’s
Spine, fossilised vertebrae not
The only thing petrified today

The road follows the ridge,
The eye follows the road;
Topping a miserly col
Then yawing off-angle
Around another vexed switchback –
An ants’ column seeking sugar
Slavishly following to its end
The dramatic rock-guarded fort;

The Cape.

Where the billowing swell
Beats the bass-drum rocks below;
Where the changing winds
Scream a mocking siren to doomed mariners;
Where the cliffs rage,
And fall mortally away
To the bullion-stacked holds
Of a hundred triremes.

Pines

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

Bowing to their guests
These bristled old pines;
Their scruffy long beards
And gnarled old muscles,
Racked by a twitchless cramp
Ossified by dendro-arthritis,
They drop their heads
To the wind
As if in servitude,
Or, with great honour,
They greet the sou’wester.

From a wind-blown seed,
Whipped from the clutches of
Some long-lost ancestor,
Nuzzled down in the sand
And, through inhospitable grains,
Sank that first insistent tap-root.
Through storm and flooding tide,
Through blistering Sun across
Countless summers
It fought for life; between
Warring sides –
One the precious fresh,
The other desparate salinity.

Dappled, in their needle
Shade we walk,
Children squeal and play,
Cicada click their
Machine-gun anthem;
The pines, stand guard,
Gnurling and twisting
To the contours
Of the years
Washing over them,
As we walk through
Unnoticed.

Scree

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

What was it made them
Clamber up the mountain;
Risk their existence;
Mine the greensand?

How did they know
To search the summit,
Hunt the highest
Reaches of the sky?

Where was the value
Of axes chipped and polished;
Roughed out with granite
Knapped to a knife edge?

Who could imagine
Their travels from home,
In curragh or logboat
Fur boot or mule?

How did we discover
This hoard beyond value –
Amongst scree and rockfall
On the edge of the void?

On the Langdale hand axe site

Meres

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

The whipping wind gathered strength,
Armed itself with razor blades,
Sheared off jags of ice and rock
Flaying in the wind,
A cat o’ nine tails, of ruthless erosion.

Buried deep in the snout of this duvet of ice –
Boulders the size of buildings;
Mountain sides snatched from source,
Children from the crib –
The weapons of war; to grind and scrape.

As the ice fled,
Its rearguard wax and wane,
Back to its Corrie-home
Left the boulder-litter
Strewn across the plain –

Coddled in ice,
Smothered by dirt
Waiting to breathe the air again.

With time – collapse;
Warmth returned;
Ice passed;
Rock fell;
Chasms opened –

The land, strewn with pot holes
And pits; craters and fractures;
Water filled; trees rose
A pock-marked land of lakes
A plain of a thousand meres.


Holloway

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

High banked, single tracked
Ways cut deep by aeons of steps,
Rutted by planked wheels
Or the constancy of hooves
Crossing the ridge-lines
To market or fair.

Winding, uphill, overtopped
By beech and oak,
Maple and hawthorn,
Rough slabs of dirty, bedded chalk
And mossy stalactites
Where water scarpers…
Leaving a shadowed bed
Of leaves and tilth.

Dappled paths, millennia old,
Connect today with yesterday –
The drover with the rambler,
The herdsman with the hiker,
Tracing or retracing
Paths through time.

Cobbles

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Sloshing through the chalk stream
Barefooted; clear waters run shallow
Flint barbs glint; these sward-sharp cobbles
Washed clean of sand; crows circle above
The white cups of crowfoot below.

Where Lower Byrom meets Great John,
Flaked tarmac, shredded by spinning rubber,
Lanc rain and the soles of endless souls,
Reveal sparking setts, peaking once more
At the grey northern sun.

Up on the Needwood plateau,
Long roads, straight as a rule-edge
Dip and climb through ancient forest shards
The Enclosure-roads are tired now
Old granite pavers smile out, remembering

On the posh estate, behind pig-iron gates
Fantails, peacocking like on Continental plazas
Spring forth; not for us, this fancy-dandy –
Spouting like a soda stream –
Just a snicket, toed-in and true.

On the Square though, are the real thing
Fished from streams; dug from fields
Where once the glaciers flowed –
Glassy in the rain, glossy in the dry;
Twisting ankles on their rounded backs.

Bumbarrel

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

The light is dimming now –
The sun tearing away
To our dark side; its diurnal doppler,
Just as the ambulance sirens
Scream to nothingness
Down the dual-carriageway

It is then, as our glitterball
Starts its twinkling
That a pack of dancers
Leap into a Quickstep –
Light of foot, gracefully
Tip-tapping through the branches

Bumbarrel, Pudneypoke,
Prinpriddle, Huggen-Muffin –
A tuppence-weighted
Zebra stripe, flashes airily
Waiting for the moment
To shimmy, to feed, to hang

Dog Tail, Long Prod,
Poke Pudding, Feather Poke –
Vortexing whispers
A crowd’s chittering laughter
As the evening warmth
Passes through them

Bottle Bird, Bottle-tit
Bottle Builder, Barrel Tom –
Squeezed together
For shared communion
In a feathered beer jug
Web-built, moss-walled

Nimble Tailor, French Pie,
Oven Bird, Miller’s Thumb –
Huddled in hedgerows
Careening through heaths
The jitterbugging Hedge-Jug –
A long-tailed social network