The hills had new places

Last night’s stormy weather reminded me acutely of a Ted Hughes poem called ‘Wind’.

This house has been far out at sea all night,
 The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
 Winds stampeding the fields under the window
 Floundering black astride and blinding wet

 Till day rose; then under an orange sky
 The hills had new places, and wind wielded
 Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
 Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

 At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
 The coal-house door. Once I looked up --
 Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
 The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

 The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
 At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
 The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
 Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

 Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
 That any second would shatter it. Now deep
 In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
 Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

 Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
 And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
 Seeing the window tremble to come in,
 Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Come this morning it had settled enough for a brisk bike ride with Glyndwr. The evidence of the evening’s elemental argument was written on the landscape in the shape of fallen trees and lakes of standing water.

The winter sun smiled and it was fun.

Have a lovely Christmas.