A Tuscan Day On A Tuscan Hill Poem by Colm Flanagan

Before dawn and all is still,
More motionless against the slow film
of the thin clouded sky.
A dog bark from the valley below
And the church’s bell hollows its ancient call.
A blue mist lies on the sleeping muscled hills
The pale gold horizon is broken
by a diamond burst
of the sun’s first rays.
Morning draws a breeze
And the tree’s leaves shiver

The snagging metal of the circular saw
Rattles through the morning and
A convoy of cars sets off to
Snake through ribbon roads.
Leathered hills are smooth hips and smooth thighs
Baked and golden.

We have stood in stony towns beneath thunder bursts
And dipped and flapped in hillside pools of blue.
We have gaggled through tourist towns
And wiped sticky ice cream fists
We have wined, watered, espressoed and cappuccinoed:
We have grazied, pregoed, scusied and molte beneed.
And the deadened drums of our
flattened vowels stumble,
like a drunk, stiff with drink,
through the towns’ lazy lollop
and staccato stutter.

The hours of the evening glide by.
And we gaze.
Gaze on the hills lunar ripples,
On the powdered sky
On silver mountain silhouettes
Through pink light and shadow tips.

Night falls and hill top towns
Turn to blurred reflections
of the starred sky.
Our laughter disappears into the cool night
And a little drunk we fall to our beds.

But this place is not our home.
We sit posted on this hill
Viewing the Tuscan world
And yet
these hills, this sun these memories
have tinged our blood.
Each childish moment
eagerly snapped or filmed
will be shared in weeks and months and years.
And the same sun and moon
will lookdown on us then
As looks down on us now
On this hill and
On this day