Landscape Poems

            In the Mist

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Calling cranes cross overhead like ghosts in the gloom,

Bells echo down the hillsides from hidden forest horses

Like shots across the valley, voices and dog barks below

Reveal others on the path as invisible to us as we to them

Knowing surrounds only by memory and sounds in the

Silence, the mist expands our senses out like landscape,

Until the sun lifts the veil and sends down into our pocket

Of the earth, a gentle caress of golden warmth and sets

The sky blue brightness shining off mountain cloud

Shimmering across imagined land beneath silver shroud.

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            The Same Scene a Thousand Times

A painter can select one scene,

One view, from a certain lookout,

Turn it into their subject: treat

It a thousand ways, in varying lights.

But can a poet? Write a thousand times

Of one mountain range and valley?

Of all the many shadows and scudding

Clouds along its sides, and all 

Aspects of the mists across its sky.

A painter can settle in one spot,

A cottage on a cliff:

Paint through the window.

A poet may install himself

In the same place,

But can he use words more than once

To illustrate the landscape?

Or once used, need he seek new views

To inspire new vocabularies?

It seems the answer lies in the

Lines, led along by eyes, looking

In ever-finer focus always finds

The mind inspired to write.

The scene from above the village of an evening.

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I have no photos of the scenes that inspired the first poem, but the second poem was inspired by sunset in the same spot I watch sunset most Sunday evenings, and each time it’s inspiring, but can I write of the same valley for the rest of my life? Possibly. It depends less on the inspiration and more on my ability I suppose!