Grey Welsh rain

I walk, a speck of locomotion

on a bracken covered sandstone hill.

Beneath my feet, 

the haul and heave of gravity.

Above, a bulk of rising rock 

that shoulders sky aside and

buttresses the ocean.

But nothing lasts forever.

At a stile 

I rest my hand on stone,

all grit and angularity;

textures of a long gone landscape.

My fingers tingle at the touch.

Nerves quiver as four hundred million years

traverse the membrane of my skin.

Stock still and locked in rock,

the sand and pebbles dream.

Their dreams are long and slow, they sleep 

like drifts of silt and sediment 

in ocean's deep. 

These pebbles never knew the green of grass;

pre-dating petalled beauties of the Spring.

The song of birds was 

many hundred million years 

to come.

They only knew the continental 

heat and cold of arid air,

the naked acres aching to be owned by living things,

longing to be softened by a soil 

and wooed by worms,

entwined by roots of tree.

But only the wind’s moan broke 

the deep Devonian silence.

Dumb, the days dawned;

the nights fell soft as whispers.

A land as mute as it was deaf.

But 

once in a while, 

the summer heat would conjure cloud enough 

to birth a thundercloud that soared

until the black sky rang,

the torrents sang, the pebbles danced and roared.

Even now I hear the echo of that joy,

as grey Welsh rain

runs off the hills.

Sand and pebble, grit and grain

unfreeze from rock 

and tumble free again

for nothing,

save the grey Welsh rain, 

will last forever.