Category Archives: words

The early morning light seeps in with birdsong.  Swallows chatter on the washing line.  Starlings bustle in the eaves.  Down by the river, nestled in the young corn, a pheasant calls out his salutation.  The morning is moving with music that weaves through the first blue light, that first tender light of dawn.

Soon golden tendrils curl around quietly waiting leaves, spread through the dew and filter through the morning mists.  Those first rays a blessing upon the patient earth.

Later the light is heavy and hot, panned out in the garden we throb beneath its glow.  The world pulses in the white heat.  We are lazy now, the birdsong lazy, the long hours lazy.  Hens cluck as they scratch dust baths in the cool soil, sending clouds up into the daylight.  The slow sun rises and sinks over a languid kingdom within the beech hedges.  Summer ripples through the garden.

In the evening comes that golden stretch of luxurious colour, the light of a setting sun.  The end of the day flourishing before it is forever gone.  In the long grass gold leaks through in dapples, low and lush.  We walk knee deep in meadow grasses, each leaf curled toward magic.  The world is fire bright and I burn, summer-struck, in a haze of russet and green.

♥

Wildwood Light

In the early light I have come across
 the old farmyard and empty field
 to the dark edge of the grove,
 wood pigeons coo an incessant hymn to the morning
 and rabbits scatter to the safety of ditches
 at my intrusion upon their dew-soaked feast.

I step into the wildwood
 with footfalls too loud in the listening gloom,
 camera in hand to capture a dawn
 I have ached for since a childhood
 spent here beneath these murmuring branches.
 It is almost-dark, I am alone looking to the east.

Suddenly the sun is here, wild and orange,
 rising fast in the brightening sky.
 I fumble with my lens, breathless,
 wanting the fiery light in just this way:
 seeping through leaves across the beechnut floor
 to my feet, my fingers, my ravenous heart.

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