Contrasts Poem by Sandy Fulton

In Mid-Wales near the sea-path to Ireland
Cader Idris rises. The world's Lothlorien,
nothing could be more a dream of elves.

That solitary mountain
heaves up from the sea three thousand feet,
a single rounded loaf,
golden wooded autumn on the lower slopes,
the upper dome a coat of many colors:
yellow heather, russet bracken,
the last of summer green below

and the white of sheep. Hundreds of sheep.
How do they stay on its sheer sides?
Surely they must slide and tumble,
to perish impaled upon the trees below.
Are they like America's Fabulous Hillside Snee,
two legs shorter on one side,
forever grazing around the hilltop?
Local folk laugh and tell me
their sheep are born with flypapered hooves,
but I think they are as delighted with these nimble creatures
as any stranger.

Ten miles northward
Blaenau-Ffestiniog rears its ridges—
two thousand feet of naked shale
against the sky.
That great hump is human-made: slag,
Discards and tailings of Britain's beautiful slate roofs,
picturesque in the rolling English countryside
in old villages where the sun comes out from clouds
like a suspicious lord peering through an arrow-slot,
to shimmer all the world's colors on rain-slick black roofs.

Slates are eternal,
but they told me slate roofs
last but three hundred years
until their oak pins rot.

Strange, the ugliness such practical beauty demands.
The slag is good for nothing—
a black and treacherous ruin
evoking hellish awe
like a vomited volcano.
But what is Lothlorien
without the contrast of Mordor?
And only a few miles apart.