Poems and Paths: EARLY MORNING MIST

Sunday, 9 December 2012

EARLY MORNING MIST

Early Morning Mist

A light and wispy blanket covers the fields

No deeper than the shoulder of a man,

Drawn from the frosty ground

By the first rays of the weakling sun

As it slowly steals the morning

From the wayward realms of night.

As ethereal and insubstantial, it is,

As the dreams that just an hour ago

Clouded my sleeping brain.

They vanished just as quickly into dawn,

And I was drawn from sleep

To go and walk amongst the mist,

Evading all responsibility for unconscious thoughts.

That is now the remit of the rooks

Assembled in the hedgerow oaks,

And the solitary hare.

1 comment:

joan said...: Hi Pete, I just came across your blog. I really like "Early Morning Mist". I have a photo blog and wonder if you mind if I share this poem on my blog. Of course, I will give you credit.

Thanks for your consideration,

Joan - Downeydailyphotos.com; 12 March 2013 at 22:38

Post a Comment

About Poems and Paths

‘Poems and Paths’ is a record of my own impressions and perceptions, mostly from walking in the wolds and vales of the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Walking and writing have always strolled along together hand-in-hand, exploring, at one and the same time, the pathways on the ground and the pathways in the mind. It’s an intimate inter-relationship that can rejoice in broad, sunny vistas or creep in trepidation through the shadowlands where one might expect any map to warn: ‘Here Be Dragons’.

Paths are so much more than just connections that join together places. They also connect us directly to the landscape, to the past and the future, to those who have walked there before us and who will follow us and, most importantly, they connect us to our own imaginations and all the thoughts, emotions and half-remembered associations that lie not far below the surface of our consciousness.

The works of all the well- and lesser-known walker/writers bear testimony to this: George Borrow, Richard Jefferies, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Edward Thomas, W H Davies and, more recently, my much-missed friend, Roger Deakin, and the
nature writer, Robert Macfarlane.

As Macfarlane observes, “Paths are the habits of the landscape. They are acts of consensual making….They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.”

Edward Thomas believed that paths record the impressions of all who pass along them:

“…heavy is the tread
Of the living: but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering”

‘Poems and Paths’ is written in the firm belief that, when traversing the pathways of the land and the pathways of the mind, it is always better to travel hopefully than to arrive.