A ride through a old battlefield and foolish romantic history.

A confounded letter on history and mistakes.

 

To see when no one else is around. To see is what happens. Understanding comes quickly when surrounded completely with the song. Remember me. The words and music are pathetic echoes that resonate from hillsides and bounce out from cliffs, deepening the tone and crying alone. Character paths differ to the same useless scenic destination. Clouds made in work form gentle gestalt's from memory and experience. Ships with sails of grand insignificance capturing only now a second thought and not a vital and precious first consideration.

This is the obvious difference between alone and lonely as written poorly in a child's examination essay.

Slips of rain washed granite and tannin cataract floods. Shelters for small mammals, sod sodden sad and shivering. Moss grown micro worlds with sudden climatic changes and the same gestalt cloud systems of their own. Electric green winter passions covering a cathedral nave of the dead white bone from a foolish sheep starved on a secret water ledge. The witch familiar carrion bird caws from under its hood of grey. In the mood of the day it hops and blank eye skull pecks from bone to green white bone.

The high strings of water orchestrate the hillsides in wide dun damnedest storms. Each burn to its own falls away vastly. Blossoming and speaking white with tea brown from what can be seen and felt. No wonder the warrior poets hated. They said remember me and only the coward carrion buzzard did. Feeding young with the strings of clan bright songs.

Let Autumn find her own safety through haunted stump bog. With mists that whisper of spectral trespass. A hag of dark sodden peat and tufted flags rotted from forgotten battles. Stones that state a death unequivocally. Here fought and died. Here was ended in bright lies. Here Cumberland in his foul stenched vastness slaughtered the youth of an old way with no thought for their future dreams. Here the rich swallowed the old and moved them across the sea. Here the victors wrote the history and the pampered pretender ran away to obscurity with the delusions of dreams. His sword bright with youth and lost lace lies.

This is real beauty. This is the glen of easy to forget. This is a green place of crag and bitter rock that suffers no fool kindly or otherwise bent to oblivion upon its shattered summits.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

It is almost, or is in a sense, a prose "Ozymandias", where we are treated to all those fleeting things of men--great fleets with their "sails of grand insignificance" the butchery associated with a long-forgotten member of a discontinued peerage, forgotten poets from forgotten battles--all washed away like Jarrett's gunner, flushed out like so many bugs, while the great forbidding crags remain, impervious to all but wind and water. Another worthy piece in the series, and, like its predecessors, to be read and chewed upon with great care.

[...]

. what a stunning picture and what a stunning piece of writing ... you've given me a lot to think about ... not just about history but about my personal history ... i know one thing for sure ... i don't want to be a fool ... hopefully, i'll succeed to some extent in transcending my inherent foolishness ... i'm inspired by this post so much that i think i might just have new ambitions ... thank you so much ...

[emmajoy]

Sometimes the past catches up with an open-minded and sensitive onlooker, someone who's able to sense , feel what's happened in the past .. he/she raises a hand and is led back ..

your writing does that .. you take people into places, guide them through experiences, sounds, touches .. then set them free to remember ..

as always .. great writing ..

[Phibby Venable]

your words are like a beautiful song at times and the sharpest sword at others.
You are an excellent writer and your images create envy! Very fine.

[R J Askew]

Culloden and the final crushing of the Jacobites and the auld religion by Stinking William. Hurrah! Was it the crowning triumph of the new men who came out of Henry 8s revolution? And then they became the new squirearchy of English gentlemen. Meanwhile the blood has soaked into the tan of the peat. The prose poem seems to build mote by mote to a pitch with:

Let Autumn find her own safety through haunted stump bog. With mists that whisper of spectral trespass. A hag of dark sodden peat and tufted flags rotted from forgotten battles.

The final third puts everything in context. Marvellous stuff, very enjoyable. Can almost sense the bog watching, as if it has a memory of what heppened.

[Donald Meikle]

To see through poet's sighs, the magnitude of lies and insignificance of war and sit and sip and wonder what it's for. G'job Ken

[SM Davis]

Bygone nightmares of one have long since been survived as champion's corner to another. How is it that the most monumental of time's occurrences have been forgotten by the most complex of minds? Beauty has it's price...

[Emily B]

I see it all through the lens of your camera. Stunning images. Brilliant colors, stark contrasts. What I can't figure, is how the sounds and smells resonate through that visual medium. It must be a magic image to come so alive that it sings itself off the page this way.