Morning breaks

Morning breaks,
The dewy landscape damp
Woodland floor nondescript
Against the dank debris
Of last year’s beech leaves
Strewn across now-muddied ground

Sun takes its first steps
Peering o’er the hills beyond
Bright, slight, tentative
Gently energising through tall-trunked trees
Their roots snake carelessly,
Slippery across the path

Which winds up, draws you on
’Cross fields and over stiles
Dog black against the green
Sniffing, turning, climbing
Oblivious to the unfolding scene
Valleys stretching ever further,
Endless and serene

You enter a copse, full of choices
Tracks this way and that
Echoing flows of idle thought
At the turn, commit to take
One not yet travelled
Doubling above and back,
Like an absent mind
Ignorant of progress

And there a gate, and there another
Modern, zinc-coated, geometric
At once with the land, yet alien to it
Barbed wire strange, rusted
Sharp yet pointless,
Its reason lost in time
Still, the path leads:

You climb the gate, continue on
Beyond, an arch in shaded stone
Ivy-strewn, made once by man
There, a cave, dark maw against the green
A giant tree perches on its upper lip
Guarding the threshold to the below
In unlikely equilibrium

You take in its rambling majesty
And you are taken
The moment calcifies,
Becomes an age, lost in time
You blink, and for a second
You see the carts, limestone laden
All is clear, no longer forsaken

The path seems wider, hoof-carved
By horses champing to descend
Towards cottages and stately piles
For stone knows does not discriminate
Caring not of grand hall, or bothy
Each block-bolstered against the wind
Harsh without, warm within

Rock rough-hewn, no romance here,
Just chipped hands and lungs bust
With lime dust from stone slowly sawn
From caves they rise at day’s end
A lost finger maybe,
A leg once crushed and splinted awry
Buts still they toil
For each dead weight means food

You climb the gate once more,
Emerge, stumbling onto meadowed hill
A bite of wind brings back the real
Birds sing, just as they ever did
A chaffinch, and maybe a wren’s ti, tic, tic
Indignant shock of a blackbird disturbed
You reflect, that is what they will have heard

Trudging back, past a last apple
Still clinging to the tree
Home to embers, left unstoked
To damp walls, yet maybe a welcome
A bath, perhaps, if time or need requires
But for them,
The bell has long since tolled

You pass a wall, now broken
Once made by the hands
Of your grandfathers
You pause, you stare
Over hills and valleys, still preserved
Below, a car horn sounds
And you head home