Shall we go?

Plateau of slate slides and gorse flumes

perpendicular. The house is at the bottom

key safe code 1412, squeak open the door to

range black, lit after much puffing and kindling,

warming the kettle and Bara Brith for afters

with bathtub vista of watery ewes.

 

Evening plunges.

Shall we go to sleep? Slumbered better than our whole life there, in a

mudstone bed, the trickery of frenzied water in the outhouse glass.

 

Shall we go?

After serving porridge with cream and honey, curious of the small cross on the OS

Friday channels us to a capel high in the hills.

Bracken like old blood, shoulder blades of shale scarped,

rain drips from graves into the tributaries, maybe it will never stop.

 

Shall we go up?

Blue banded ghost, these contours mark reservoirs,

here dammed water wrinkles down epochs.

White cottage hunkered on the banks at Elan,

An old ram, braying on all fours

Taliesin, the shining brow, composing.

 

Scribbling in charcoal the crude tree-roots and sediment,

One lost tale from The Mabinogion washed away.

Crow call, a branch dangling in the rapids,

Wielding a sixteen-point compass but we still can’t find our path.

 

Seeded, haunting darkest peat on upland moor,

worrying away the months, now light germinates from wet.

Shall we go back?

Coming home, Cynefin, animals carve the drenched lands clean,

grid references, coordinates, stretchmarks, tears gripped in slate.

 

Go and we shall trace its course,

Meandering, hastening, bounding, as a hind, deathless to the Wye.

 

Melanie Marshall is a freelance editor who lives near a Neolithic long barrow in Somerset, with her husband, son, daughter and two cats. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and a BA in English Literature from Cardiff University, has had poems and short stories published by The Moth, Momaya, Pen & Inc Press, The Ghastling and Prole Books, and her novel Noir Gris was longlisted for the Mslexia Prize.