Birthlines Poem by Barry Van Asten

It is in my mind to be
Rested, in this dark urgency...

Gnarled god of infinite beauty,
With ancient tongue, the hills awake
To nature's call and the season's duty;
To the magic and menace that you make!

And in these things we love the most,
Great beasts of boughs are lost to us.
They wear the darkness like some ghost
That rattles around the rooms of a house.

With their bulged limbs of lump and grot
Deep-twisted through the roll of land;
Green-skirted in your rooted rot:
Horror and history, grooved and grand!

Gorged on darkness, this heart finds
A terrific sadness, deep, that clings...
Death strikes where the river winds
Through a changed landscape that sings

Of experience and gnosis, of hedgerows lost;
Of pathways and barrows and Saxon slain...
To wake the sleeping sylvan ghost
And thunder over mound and hill again!