I sit in the shade but around me all is dusted with light. Walking the streets of the city below, the heat would be wounding, but somehow, here, it is just. It settles on the wall, on the table, on the grass, as if it were painted to appear just this way. Light that gathers on your skin and becomes part of you. Light that is the air and all it touches. Enhancing its colours, embodying each sense. Clean and complex and all that was once dreamt of. Here is the conception of Light.
I sit in the eye of a storm; a storm unseen and tumbling and bathing the landscape. A grain on the shore, I look out beyond my refuge, to coastlines, and city, and sea that stretches on and on as if it is still growing. And the echoes of all that these places have been, carry on waves and arrive back to my lone hill. Salt from the sea foam, churning the sand and settling onto the breeze. Water that coils under the thumb of the wind, humming a tune like a crowd all aligned. It sounds like the rain, like a page turn, or grain falling, another warm pattern that nature repeats.
I sit on the grass and it moves like a blanket, resting, content, on the hillside, as if they’re in love. I gaze at this scene, of the scatter-brush, and the sand, and the single blooming tree. They weave together and commune by merely existing in each other's presence, they interlace in a way that needs a shared past. The grass is touched brown, rough like a doormat, and it’s speckled with green, like flecks from a paintbrush, where its edges meet the low walls. It protects the soft earth from the view of the sun, who doesn’t quite realise that its gaze can do harm. But as much as the grass guards the cool earth, the brown too marks where it meets the sunlight, their connection so strong that it changed what we see.
I see, as I sit, all the people walk up to my lone little hilltop up above the great sea. A part of me worries that they won’t see its beauty, that they’ll feel the heat, curse the sound, shoo the flies. I sit for hours, here in the shade, watching the birds, and the beetles, and the waves. Poems and stories embrace me like they were already here, waiting to be seen. I breathe in this space like I'm part of the scene, and I worry that visitors don’t see it too.
But I’m surprised every time I arrive, because every time I find someone new looking beyond the wall. And they do it all day, these people from elsewhere, they’ll come and they’ll pause and they’ll look at the view. Travelers, business men, mothers, and students. If just for a moment, they turn and they see out beyond the lone hilltop they’ve found themselves on. I wonder if they’re truly seeing the intricacy built into the landscape, or whether they just look and see only the words that represent the things, not the things for what they are. But I think of the walk, of the heat, of impatience, and I marvel that anyone comes here at all. And they do. Many do. Perhaps I’m not special to hear the land calling, the words of this place that are speaking so clear. How beautiful it is to be one of the masses and see that they recognise what I do, that through all the fanatical rushing we’ve created, we’re, all of us, able to see beauty and to join it.
Cover Image by Rob Potter
Written in October 2023
Nature Poem, Lighthouse Poem
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