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Tag: walk

Passing By

Passing By

Published by Adrian North on 6 April 2018

How many years have these stones
Here stood?
Mute watchers of hurrying seasons
Here where once lived voices
‘Neath turf and heather roofed
Lie now open to storms hungry soul
Windows where eyes once gazed
On walls and ferns and burn below
Now lie open to the clouds
Like needle eye unthread
All is silent now
Except for winds harsh howl
Garden grazed by black faced sheep
Lichen grows on fireplace
Where peat a family kept warm
All is cold now
Untended
Unheeded
As I walk on

18/09/1998

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Suburban Hell

Suburban Hell

Published by Adrian North on 12 March 2018

As I stumble through this existence
I wander past
Rows of stark stone prisons
Encaging sad suburban souls
Within their lifeless, faced-brick cells.
They mete out their unhappy existences
Behind tired chintz masks
Vying with each other
In uselessness
And emptiness
Trying to be the first
To new levels of unhappiness.
They seek to pacify
Their material gods
With plastic offerings
Lain before a brushed chrome altar.
They have the same oneness of mediocrity,
Of outward decency
And inward moral gangrene.
They talk of the weather,
The news,
The garden
And inside they lust
For fornication
To the world they are virtuous
And to the universe nothing
Forever NOTHING.

13/07/1990

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A life reborn (Some thoughts at Tushielaw)

A life reborn (Some thoughts at Tushielaw)

Published by Adrian North on 9 March 2018

Eagles cry, eagles haunt
Above moorland
Of grouse
And heather
And life
Myriad sheep trod paths
Lead me deeper
Into this delightful, deceptive freedom
On the edge
Of my existence
Fresh, cold, sharp winds
Buffet me
And roar
Deep gullies
In my soul
Cutting deep
They wound
And cleanse
And drive cobwebs
Long grown
From my being
And once again
I am me
And I am free

18/09/1998

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Winter Sunrise
A walk

A walk

Published by Adrian North on 29 January 2018

The grey cold of winter rain
lashes face and hands and me.
Raven clouds dark as my damaged thoughts
lie overhead, threatening, sinister.
Muddy paths leading to muddy places
through trees scoured clean by loathsome storms.
Past verdant leaves indifferently slaughtered
scud across my shadowed dreary view.
Hearing no-one, seeing no-one and being no-one
trudging onward, slipping, stumbling, sliding, swearing.
My mood as black as longest night
companion to my wary winter woodland wander.
Sombre thoughts of death unfettered rise
unbidden to my mind.
I must escape this path, this wood, this life
or stay forever snared in this leafless, lifeless grove.
I reach the edge of brooding breathless copse
driven to the open fields of freedom before me.
And still the grey cold of winter rain
lashes face and hands and me.

07/02/2017

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A walk along a river bank

A walk along a river bank

Published by Adrian North on 22 January 2018

Through the chill mist comes the honk of lonely goose
From an island over in the stream
Somewhere out of view
In the grey light of early day

In the field cattle stand
Lowing, guiding the days bright entrance
Chewing cud and grass
Viewing world with watchful eye

From nowhere the wheezing whoosh of wings
Tells us of swans arising
On tall columns of milk frothed air

Ahead on dewy bank
A heron statued stands
A grey sentry to our approach
Along path
Sided sometimes by sloes
In their season

Distant comes the whispering
Watery sound of weir
And mill and stream
And the church bell tolling
This hour of dawn

At the gate in the corner we turn
And homeward head
To a world more frantic
Than this timeless place

22/04/1998

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