Watershed

When the wind blew in an afternoon,
The rain, coming upon the forest edge
Renounced its thunderhead full of heaven
And fell to ground.

In the enduring peat,
Through the black months waiting in the calendar of seasons,
Amongst the drowning blindness of roots,
The rain returns out of the seeping earth:
A spring at first, a stream, a loch of champing waves,
At last a river.

Water fumbles at the shapes of stone,
Makes figures of them, rubs them out,
Crumbles their shabby hearts, grips them like ice
And carries them away in piecemeal armies underground.

The sky expands in exhalation, breathing out the long night.
Cold sighs frost on the dead grass
The music that hollows out the earth
Trickles under the icebound streams.
The stars whisper in our own blood
Where the first sea runs in its red tide.
Our fathers’ rain falls in us endlessly,
Our mothers’ encloses us like clouds.

What it is to be human and sheltered by our subterfuge:
So we find a dry place, find a harvest or a mechanism,
In our rainless homes we rule as ignorant kings
The power and small glory,
The knowledge and scant wisdom,
The illusion that decay is forestalled.

What it is to be human on a planet of glass:
The fragile construction of our lives
Shatters more easily than the stone rubbed by the river’s back.
The melting waters can outlast us, even when we build for tomorrow.
The wild forest and its livestock will return to our doorways
When our lintels slip sideways with the rain into our abandoned rooms.

Trees and grasses know the story of our ignorance.
They bend in the shuffling wind.
There is no silence to speak of.
And that same wind howls down from the cold hills.
Its heavy weather spits in the face of time,
And black night veils morning.

An old Scots Pine leans towards his destiny,
Seedlings scattered downwind drift like grass.
One day this father of trees will fall dead,
Feeding tomorrow with his wood.

The wise tree says to us:
Put your faith in continuity.
You created the wheel but now you reinvent it.
You cut me across the heart for timber,
Crucify me on your wagons and roll away to meet your destiny.
I am here when you are gone.

Put your faith in time and place.
You will not accept a gift but you wait to steal it.
You tear the world apart for treasure
Burn earth for metal,
Crush mountains for an atom of profit
Suffocate in the reek of it for ever.
I will be here when you are gone.

Steepness, worn by the force of gravity
Slides its hand into the shallow place of a river,
Touches both history and foreknowledge,
Concealing the seeds from which we may grow tomorrow.

Initialising