Ring Fort of Dun Aenghosa (Ireland-Aran Is)
No one would breach
your walls;
no one would want
dominion
of your barren plots.
Go, keep your stronghold;
huddle safe beside
your peaty fires, secure,
for no one wants
to own the place
except the sea,
a thousand feet below
that gnaws in tidal
teeth a little
granular insult
beneath your
basalt ramparts,
while you work
or sleep
or stare the world away
from off your crumbling
ledge.
Organ Recital (Edinburgh)
We had to do it, it was free.
St Giles was awe-inspiring too.
A moment’s lapse of sanity
found us expectant in the pew.
The organist, a tiny lass,
presaged no auditory threat.
The organ’s great majestic mass
awoke a tentative regret.
Then came the first resounding blast,
a thunderous sonic blunderbuss.
Some crazed musician ages past
unleashed apocalypse on us.
Bagpipes, mad in steroid-craze,
their hideous screeches amplified,
in rebel adolescent phase
could not be louder if they tried.
With no chance of dignified escape
we scanned programs in shaking fist
to see in horror, mouths agape,
five more selections on the list.
Mt. Snowdon (Wales)
Mist is a capricious elf,
disdainful of reality.
It hides in the coattails
of rain clouds
muttering over
the shoulders
of Snowdon’s far-off ridge.
It can cloak the fells and crags,
and swamp high valleys
frothed with sheep;
then evaporate and stare
from clefts beyond on sunlit vales.
The magician’s art it knows,
amusing itself in these high lands
where we inch up the railway incline
hailing walkers on the trails
as intermittently they reappear —
the veil across our vision swept aside.
All travel is a mountain trek
the summit just a popcorn prize beyond,
the journey and the clouds upon the way
are really all that matters in the end.
English Autumn (Cotswolds, England)
September tentatively here
suggests an autumn theme —
some yellow tints
in beech and chestnut trees,
the oaks sigh dryly in the breeze.
While birches, nordic transplants,
always brash, begin
to drop their golden leaves,
the general boreal tone
remains reserved.
If you want riot
(the stately planes proclaim)
of red and gold, go north
or off to Canada, but here,
we’re British, don’t you know.