A9

Clear sky and snow on the farthest hills
lose themselves as cloud and mist
trouble the summits.

The sow and the boar,
like upturned livestock in the steam of the sty,
farrow in the wet of burn and lochan,
amniotic rivers birthed through the bealachs,
poured down the flanks of moorland and heather.

Rain, at first, on the wind, roads,
like endless wounds, cut the slopes with travel
as if going, so seldom good, is only a connection
between one place and the next.

Amid ragged blue, the sun, a fire without heat,
tears the scud-mist while wired pylons stretch
electricity across stone walls and buildings;
another river, indistinguishable from the last,
still rocky, winds in the hollow of the glen.

Far off still, the hills, their high snow gone,
carry a scar of track-bed through steep woods
bleeding with bare trees; no train in sight.

Stone-built lodges, lodge-pole plantations,
follow the metalled road, skirt it, one road,
rough and hard, stone-cut, level, damp,
busy with cars, birch-smirched, pine-lined,
littered with the jetsam of passage:
tyres and wheels, broken casings;
all that journeys demand
all that they throw away.

Light, fading now, under an opening sky
as the rough road shakes its hands in a palsied tremor,
a torn nerve’s involuntary dying in a wooded rut;
snow still on the tops, dust, a cold christening,
glistening white but ridged by exposed rock;
below its gradient, fading out or in,
the landscape’s brown contour rubs itself
with the last colours of the day.

© BH, 2018

---

Must be the time of year. I’m feeling more naturalistic. Perhaps the turn of the seasons, the entire planet hurtling toward perihelion (4th January), has diverted me away from the political chaos unfolding its incompetence around me and the same poisoned madness, its machinery of relentless acquisition and greed, bulldozing everything before it.

Naturalistic. While I can be… that is.

The scene is the A9, Scotland’s mountain artery, where the sky meets the land as if (almost) there is nothing else. Except road and rail and wires and broken stuff…