Influence

A narrow, and remote, lane in North Cornwall; leading, eventually, up to an ancient, granite, cross. Here the powers of nature are definitely in the ascendancy over the works of man.

It was still early

When I turned to walk down the lane.

The air was already warm;

Hardly moving;

Fetid with cow dung;

Patchy with insect-swarms.

Before me, a large tree,

Had tried to reach across the way;

A cluster of its tangled limbs,

Shaped, from that line of sight,

Like a gigantic, boney, fist.

Its companions,

Acolytes, or familiars,

Had, sometime, snaked upwards,

Like screams, frozen across the sky.

Moving past;

Glimpses of broken-down walls;

Slates, almost totally subsumed

By the tide of mosses, ferns and ivies.

Knotted tree roots,

And all manner of undergrowth,

Had a strangulating grip,

On anything that might once

Have been a gate, or fence-post.

Very little of man’s influence remained,

Just the road itself, grassy down the middle;

Hoofprints embedded in pats;

Tractor-treads in slurry.

Amongst it all,

Blackthorn blossomed,

As white as tumbling surf;

The high-air, filled

With a gamelan of lark-song.

Eventually, rising to a crossroads,

The vegetation became less choking.

Crows, roosting on what had once been, a barn,

Coughed, before retreating.

There,

Stood a malformed,

Centuries-old, ‘cross’;

Mysterious and remote;

It’s influence, Pagan, or Christian,

(Perhaps both);

Still powerful.