Among ancient groves
Temptress burns to die for, frolicking down the mountainside
For a million years and thousands more. Really, could I have died?
Bonnie Pictish stream, tumbling, churning old but ever young.
Go on! Race on! Sparkling mercury veins and licking tongues.
Ne’er stop your gabbling nor rubbing shoulders with rock and tree -
As old as you but resolute, as all good friends should be.
The rocks remain, as Maxwell said, though they will grow new clothes -
Submerged and drenched - in verdant green among the ancient groves.
Oak, birch, alder – they’re old too, as grounded they come and go,
And in their turn and turn around they grow and die and grow.
Hearing the talk Pictish folk heard - aye, and Jacobites too -
Intimate intercourse with a world we all once knew.
Careening wannabe mermaid you know little of this,
So yarn and gossip away as a sister to a sis.
A sis who can’t be listening for all that she gives back;
Perhaps she listens but ne’er hears rock music or the craic.
So swerve round ’em and plunge to deep dark mysterious pools.
There, rest awhile and recover your bubbles’ sparkling jewels.
Then take up the race again, innocent and henny fresh,
Brawling on unruly free in your age-old youth - careless.
Aye, careless waif - reeling in Caledonian hills -
Twirl and swirl in pirouettes showing your petticoat frills.
How can you be so young yet so old synchronously?
In these tumbling ravines - take down your wisdom to the sea.
Within an aqueous soul there is no pretence for us;
Columns of freshwater have pure memory and substance.
But that great repository of cruel fools - distant still -
Predators and prey, murderers and victims, if you will.
What chronicles do they hear from fresh up the mountainside?
Alas, now fresh no more in salt and plastified seacide.
So, Mistress Burns, stay awhile in your eddies and rock pools,
Do not go cascading on to break your heart chasing fools.
Stay here in our mild rainforest - the verdant groves we found -
With great rampaging primordial beauty all around.
Woody, wet and cloud-laden, the old Picts are talking rain.
And Mistress Burns keeps racing, trailing ripples like a mane.
I clamber up the burn and probe all her secret places.
But she cares not for I come and go and leave no traces.
Bird-singing water falls not to ground. Instead, vaporous
Misty veils plump up emerald pillows of billowed moss.
Then tangled oak limbs and briars bend, grinning mischievously
Beneath crusty bearded lichen intent on tangling me.
But would I care - in an exquisite sylvan hideaway -
If emerald depths close over me and, in splendour, I drown today.
© RM Meyer
Highlands, April/May 2022
