Chalk Grasslands Poem by Barry Van Asten

The day wheel turns – the air is ringed
And teeth of dark assembly grow;
Her flesh lawned in sunned ecstasy,

Sipped and sweetened by geological rage.
The night holds the riddle of enchantment:
Marjoram, wild thyme, early gentian… time rolls
The nerve system, jerked into existence
By the mode of the mind, sublime…
A moon-gulf of wisdom approaches
Like an engine of tears on the wane;

Eyebright – the ghost song’s arising
In the tor-grass, on the hills again…
And the dead they are here, they are cheering,
They come, as lights across a distant port;
Dull with death, and enthralling,
The embers of their thought, console me,

And retain a sense, a deviant call
Where the heart, vacated in heat
Is lifted to the contours of magical thought –
A voice – the brain’s delusion in regret!
The stars, they are laughing, above us
And seem to know, we’re here;

In the planes of new life, young seed
Where darkness holds the animated spirit…
Wild rabbits tunnel the chalk…
Speeds across the heath
And hides in the flowering undergrowth
From the ever-hungry beak!
Thoughts elevated in soft song,
Thistle-mown: the furrows shall remain;
Where stone curlew and Adonis blue
Sometimes measure and haunt the chalk hills, again.