Following on from here are some of my own composotions - in a couple of cases accompanying pictues I've taken.

I had thought to carve from the stone a face
of beauty and of grace.
I set about the task with energy and purpose,
Utterly lost in the act of physical creation;
The hammer that I held, the chisel that it struck and the slow,
un-pealing of the stone with each
Flake-creating blow
Possessed my concentration so
All sense of passing time was lost.
A shape emerged, shaped - I thought - by me,
But what I saw when I stood back
Were violence, flames, hate and death,
Entwined around a child’s face
Whose mouth was opened in a cry,
And eyes were weeping blood.

Outside the shops dressed for Christmas, movement everywhere - a confusion of coats, shoes, bags; of “don’t-you-run-away” holding hands, and here-and-there a bustling urgency pushing past gawpers and dawdlers outside the shops.
On the street beneath angels and candles strung overhead, thick traffic moving jerkily through the town by the river in that far-off valley.

The road I’m cycling on is climbing still, its steep inclines forcing from my lungs a harsh, gasping rhythm and filling my legs with aches until flattening out somewhat it brings me to the top, and here I stop, my eyes, in long slow drafts, drinking all they see.
On the moorland beside the road are sheep, tough as the grasses they chew upon and seeming to be set in this landscape as though they were outcrops of rocks left exposed by eons of erosion.
The Solstice sun paints pale greens and patches of dark browns, all spread across the rise and fall of these billowing hills, and way down there, where leafless woods cloak a curving slope, a sudden lake reflects the sky - a gleaming, flawless jewel.

There is another side.

A sun that’s low casts but half of what you see in a certain light; turn around and face that sun to see the world transformed, and so it was when now I gazed and was entranced by what I saw on that high and silent place.
I looked towards a massive shape, its details in that light no more than dimly hinted at; a lump of land dropped from the sky and spreading out like dough, or, if whimsy took my fancy, a giant lying asleep on that dark horizon.
Threadbare clouds half hid the sun whose light, escaping through some holes, shone in pearly beams, and where they fell upon the Earth there was illumination; a pool of colour, and rising from a lonely house, a smear of rising smoke - all else mystery and gloom.

These images imprinted on my mind and, I felt, enriching me, I rode towards the town.
Ahead, a crowd of crows had gathered round some dead thing in the road, their flapping flight as I approached heavy with resentment .
What, I wondered, had they found?

Had I died on that hill, and was I now reborn?

Bird

I too can fly like you, Bird,
I too can soar -
my feet here on the ground,
my body glued to earth.

But Bird, the "I" inside my head
has wings as wide as yours and
when I chose, I too, Bird,
am just as free as you.

Did you see, I wonder, where I put my heart?
Full to overflowing with my love for you?

I carried it so gently across that rocky shore
And all the way I bore it `til I reached your door.

My heart and I climbed mountains,
and watched by beasts of prey,
we stumbled through dark woods,
uncertain of our way.
I wanted you to have it; to keep it just for you.

Your smiling eyes were icy when you turned us away,
And in my confusion I put it down somewhere.

But now I cannot find it - My eyes too filled with tears.

Falling

Falling leaves slip silently through the autumn air from their autumn glories,
And in that graveyard which I passed they'll lie and fade, as do memories of the dead.

On tombs and headstones names are carved which now are long forgotten;
"John" and "Jacob, "May" and Mary" who died so long ago.

Above the graves where lie their bones and who and what they were,
fallen leaves cover the ground - gay today and stirred by breezes but not for very long -Saddened by the winter rains, then they'll be a mourning cloak for those no longer mourned.

Mr Normal

"Look at me" he said.
"I`m proud of what I am
"I'm honest - often - And if I lie, it's only because I have to.
I do it less than some I know who think they're relatively truthful.
I'm not unfaithful to my wife -
Not in any normal sense
When "normal" means
Sleeping with her friends.
There have been times, I do admit, I've been obliged to oblige
A friendly "bit of skirt" -
But always most discreetly, mind,
And with the understanding it's Strictly "entre nous" - with absolutely
No strings attached - is that understood?
I haven't stolen anything since I was a kid,
OK. Yes. When my house was broken into, I did inflate the losses;
Everyone does the same - I mean - you beat the system if you can,
Or the system will beat you.
It's what you learn at school.

"Look at me" he said. "Do I look abnormal?"