Eventide

Drawn on a string, migrant along the downhill grids
over the Earth’s wide belly
my destination no meridian idyll
but the southerly shores of Albion, my home.
I trundle, ant-like, earth-inching
as the white sun headlong, hugely radiant
totters into the night’s tall arms
frilled and frothed with bits of fluff, rosy-blushed
where the husky slabs of Moor
those dreamy haunches outlined in inked precision
sculpted and scalloped
the deepest, softest, lusciousest layers of blue
you ever saw, smelt, felt
ridge upon ridge, slopes, outcrops, tattered windbreaks
piled and banked endlessly, shading to pastel nothings
smudged into the breathing body of those ancient hills
old when Atlantis was young
sprung out of the boiling seas
with clarions of tumult, the rocks belching molten fire
in this same serene eventide.

How long and arch does she lie
while lichen and moss creep over her bare contours
and grasses slither silken along the wind’s razor edges:
immemorial yet pristine, ever-present, newly now.

When the sun stood still
poles flipped, oceans leapt to the skies
what wonder this elemental skin was not ripped off, into the blackest space
leaving not one drop, no living spec nor molecule of air
to clothe that ravishment;
yet here she lies, effulgent, luxuriant
drenched in sapience,
ecstatic and erotic in her glory flesh;
while microbial man scales her heights and depth unwitting
but for the odd, rare glimpse, sense, flavour
of divine.