A Sunny Afternoon in March
One sunny afternoon in March, and I am yet again sitting in a field -
this time by a narrow shallow slow moving stream - in this rural
England that I love. Yet, even here so sad to say, the rumble of
traffic, miles distant, can be heard, as one Homo Hubris after another
trundles on in such a trundling life as becomes them.
Here - only the Frog, still, there on the bottom of the stream,
unmoving as I for ten minutes. Here - a Skylark, rising, singing. Here
-
a blue sky as the morning dull cloud broke to leave shuffling Cumulus
which brest the distant hill in my South. Here - a hay meadow where
life grows as it grows: now with wild Primrose by the hedge and Daises
rising, opening, in the grass soon to be home to the so many wild
flowers of late English Spring...
Yesterday I remember so well how I came down from a walk in the hills
alone having stood to watch the Dawn Hour where beautiful patterns of
colour became transformed almost minute by minute: a dark narrow band
of altocumulus above the eastern horizon behind which was another
higher
band of thinner cloud with the yet-to-rise Sun scintillating their
colour, edge to edge, from magenta to English Rose-red to crimson to
Roman-purple while, around, a banded sky of azure, violet and
early-morn-blue changed as it changed, slowly, as if in rhythm with the
growing light... So much beauty, to softly, gently bring a crying as
one cries silent when so much life, so much
belonging, touches to stilly touch that deeper-being, within.
Yes, I remember how, there on that narrow summit bounded by hedge,
tree, bush, I had stood, leaning on my stick, as the birds around sang
- Blackbird, Robin, Wren, Thrush... There had been an Owl, hooting, as
I walked up the narrow wooded path in the almost-dark before Dawn Hour;
some rustling in trees nearby as wild Deer, startled by bearded man,
moved as they moved, away. I remember how, on my return, I emerged from
the narrow path - there an old Roman road - to stand before the modern
road which bisects the village, and it was as if I had entered another,
strangeling, world, not quite human.
Gone - the slow natural quietness of Nature. Gone - the changing lights
and that sense of belonging. Gone - the sacred stillness of so much
beauty. Instead - cars, fastly moving in their haste and their noise.
Not for their denizens, hunched, the taste of early morning English
Spring-March air; not for them the song of birds as the Dawn Chorus,
numinous, builds as it builds in March, beyond a now passed bleak-dark
Winter. Not for them - the hunched, eyes-fixated - the slow
natural walking rhythm of a natural walking life where one can through
slowness watch the light growing in that wondrous Dawn Hour on a clear
day before the Sun, bringer of Life, breaks forth over the horizon
where we
dwell, knowing thus our fated fragile smallness.
So, yes, I remember how I felt, yet again, then - feeling I do not
belong to the modern world with its noise, denizens, speed and lifeless
abstract urban concerns. And yet - and yet, that world is so eagerly,
so earnestly, encroaching upon, destroying, my world where I,
reclusive, dwell within my silence. So I sigh, to see the green Frog
move
to rise, slowly, to fill itself once more with air here where one field
is one cosmos, observed.
DW Myatt
March 2007 CE