Grey Markings.

It is night and I am writing about something of significance I experienced soon after waking today.

My home is a top flat in a Victorian villa over-looking Morecambe Bay. Directly across the sands lies the small town called Grange-over-Sands; behind it range upon range of Lakeland Hills.

Picture me. Picture the dawning morning.

 Coffee. The customary internet tasks. Equable. Rested. Serene. Alone but not lonely. The whole grey bay before me. 

Absorbed, drawn out across the flats, unbidden I write a series of measured tweets, inevitable as the sluggish tide away out there.

There is no struggling for words. No emotion but the measure of the lines that pulse from the natural scene through me as streams impregnate soil.

The spell broken, the lines re-read, I thought it fit to copy and unite these fragments which. though presumptuous to term 'a poem' are perhaps 'poetic prose'.

I liked (and still do) very much what I wrote this morning and went about my day satisfied, exhilarated by the whole experience.

In the interim before returning to Twitter, some lovely friends out there had left messages of concern I think for my state of morale, reading these 'grey markings' as expressions of depression or faltering hope. I promptly thanked them and corrected these well-meant misapprehensions, in the process identifying the predominant feeling: achievement in giving faithful voice to inarticulate murmurings from the sands, the sea and the sky.

"Grey Markings".

Here on the edge of Lakeland it is the kind of day whole Roman legions march into mists and just disappear.

Grey the sand, grey the land, grey the grumbling sky:
Just another late December; just another year to die.

No one wins battles on days like this.

There is something fearful and wonderful when Leviathan India awakes.

The trick is to see the colour in the grey and accept the stain.

I don't know whence or how these words are coming...they are just lying out there in the bay I look on each day.

When events of great moment occur even the prose is poetic.

Nature is...adjusting. I feel it in the sullen tide.

As the bird trusts air so we place our faith in words.


Ray Wilcockson (Saturday December 29, 2012). (copyright).