Tangled in Words.

Up on the hillside I hear them
snaking amongst the gnarled trees
like some crazed dancer,
reeling to a fiddler’s tune,
earthbound and star-struck,
crazed on moonbeams
and drunk on sweet starlight.

At first they whisper
like hare’s breath on the cusp of dawn,
a light breeze sliding over polished flint,
laughter among the crisp beech leaves;
then they gather into a chant
reciting spells and makings and imaginings
that cause the clouds to weep
and the sky to moan with longing.

I walk on the edge of the wood
and listen with hunger
to make sense of the web of language,
the tangle of words and syllables
that assault my senses and cloud my vision.
I await the wise man to solve the riddle
of ages

but all I hear are rustles, and creaks,
the groans of old trees and the breaking of buds,
the whispers of silken grass and the heartbeats
of creatures lay hidden in the copse.
I read the chatter of finches
and the sigh of a moorland breeze
brushing the feathers of a hawk,
the surge of ripples on a peaty pool,
the heaving of fossils in the old wall -


I walk on.