This poem only available on Lush Stories


The grey skies of the morning howl the dawn’s awakening screams;
The lacklustre pearl scuds across the moors of my dead hope
As the wind claws my hair from the band that holds it back.
I hide between the rocks that can’t shelter me from the cold;
I shiver with the memories of ancient days of loneliness.
The barren rolling hills stretch for miles,
Supporting sleeping heather-laden tors crowned with the rocks that I seek refuge under.
The tufts of fluttering, mischievous grass that hide the sucking mud of the peat bogs
Laugh e’er I dare to show my sad, wraith-pale face.
Sweeping arrowhead rain thunders sideways,
Lashing the heart that died when my spirit crawled out of me and
Span away, hurled down the face of the cliffs
Where I stood in the storm with the tempest
Snapping my clothes and punching me,
Beating me backwards and forwards,
Pressing me to the ground in despair.
Would that I could leap and swim the vicious currents,
Sailing on the thundering air until my ugly weight is crushed upon
The sharp scree and poured into the hidden earth where
Nature will embrace me where he has not.
For never will dawn the day with a gentle breeze and the humming
Of honey heather-drunk bees as they amble their way through
The sunken valleys of bracken and fern,
Wobbling from crag to crag as the sun stretches itself
And creeps along the gentle waving heights,
Warming each blade and drying the hollows,
Kissing each lapwing and ousel as their babies wriggle out of their nests.
Never will that day dawn where the hills are teeming
With life that takes wing in beating feather-laden flurries;
Where the heat from on high warms the peat-brown streams
Of the babbling source that meanders its mineral-rich way to fall
Down the coppery rocks in a never-ceasing shower to enrich
The lush green valleys with quenching nectar of Earth’s hidden stores.
Where Earth and Sun meet in embrace,
What is there for me?
I am left in the moorland barrenness,
And the hope of summer is too far away.
Every day, I awaken to the grey skies of the morning,
With dawn’s lonely wailing echoing my own
Because he doesn't want me.

This poem only available on Lush Stories