Fiesole

Took a stroll round Fiesole in coldish afternoon sun. Italy really can turn on the charm every now and then.

Thank you for all recent comments on Blipbirthday etc. They are very much appreciated.

I've been trying to put down some thoughts about being 'home', our brief trip to Rannoch Moor. It started out as blank verse and has grown into something else. This is probably not the definitive article but time passes
and memories decay

By Rannoch Moor
 
I have lain these two last long winter nights
Trying to let the silent, starless darkness in
Breathing for enlightenment
Or sleep eternal like spring time rain
Or maybe just some middle slope
Less acid in my stomach
And more giving in my heart.
 
Morning comes unbidden
After the moor’s profoundest night
And fills the godless spaces
With what here they pass for light
And rounded out the short day bows
And burnished colours briefly stay the sky
The sparrow crow and buzzard call
And dipper bobs as time flows by
 
The course and frozen Old Sandstone sand
Of Loch Laidon’s piled up northern beach
Lies doglike between hummocked bog and lake
And lets the eye in cold innocence roam to reach
The far off sentinel hills beyond the Glencoe road unseen
 
That empty beauty that is all owned up
It’s bitter history/present plain to see
Feeds and furrows brows and hope
And uses up the stuff in me
Our outline in the vastness
woven daylight brief
 
Later Glen Lyon’s hemmed in lanes unroll
And thickening clouds makes less with more
A strewn and shattered tarmac strip
Climbs the hill from valley floor
And raises us to nervous raven giddy heights
Of corrie pass and cwm
Tarmachan scowling
at our car-bound flightless flight
 
We skirt Ben Lawer’s western flank
Bare complete of all idea of her Alpine blooms
And wind our way down to the loch
And through Killin and Callander the gathering gloom
Closes tight at Stirling Mart
The night well down
And barely after three.
 
Back in the dark-lit thick of it all
We stumble down bright Waitrose aisles
Salmon wine and something something something else
Road weary from the winter miles
We fleeting traced across the map
Caught between notions of hearth and hame
 
Terry comes round for tea
The wine soothes and straightens out our winter ills
The season turns and won’t be stopped
And yet the castle’s on her hill.