Falling Through Water
Your eyes face a fading light,
searching the sway of a young man
whose footprints are shadows on a dark sea.
You are there, high-tech trainers skimming
through a mirrored path,
interrupted only by the relics of a stone wall,
where you hesitate, then stride over its
irreversible past.
A halo of crows signpost the place
where a man might die. See beyond
their silhouettes, unwrap the heavy sky,
cloud by cloud, lay them to one side.
You can see it now, when you stepped out
of the boundaries, through soft glass,
falling through coloured dreams
like a stone through water.
Your monochrome sight
always returned with cruel interpretation.
Perhaps you grew wings to measure
the sun’s distance, simply to witness
its gradual extinction. Your acid burned fingers
silenced love’s suggestion.
Who inhabits your soul now?
Have the colours eclipsed your reflection?
The moon moves closer to your sight,
but forms no image on your mind.
Only the crows witness your death,
the black doves of your imagination
feast from your tight shut eyes.
You creep into the landscape
in seamless white, your undefined grave
a brief resemblance of your life.
Mountain Stream
As a child,
I gave it the gift of my soul,
poured dreams into its fast
flowing light, its language
pure and understood.
And now,
what light there was,
is darkened by the shadow
of a man’s life. Birds dart
in and out of an empty sky,
no trees to hold the
weightlessness of their song;
a silence I never knew.
And in the silence,
I hear the trickle of words,
in a language I no longer
understand. In the distance,
a child scatters stones into a pool,
making patterns of light.
Rowland Hughes is a Welsh writer and poet. He was born, and lived until his late teens, in the Rhondda Valley, from where he still draws most of his inspiration. He worked as a Master Decorator and studied trades in the construction industry. He later became a Local Authority Assistant Surveyor. Due to ill health, he retired in 1997. In 1998, he joined a Cardiff University Creative Writing Group. He loves to observe people, places and nature, writing in bustling cafés and the confines of his writing shed.
Both of these were delights to read. The first thing I noticed was how developed and unique the poetic voice is. That is not easy to do and I can imagine it took great cultivation to arrive at such a readily identifiable and consistent voice.
Both poems also do a wonderful job of capturing a sense of longing. The longing in "Falling through Water" is "external," or directed towards the addressee. That in "Mountain Stream" is internal, reminiscing. The tone and diction capture the same sense, despite the different perspectives.
Both poems also immediately capture the imagination and effectively conjure a vision. Wonderful!
I love both poems. Beautiful, well-crafted work.
The second poem has already been dealt with far more adequately than I could. But the first poem 'Falling Through Water' also repays close analysis.
At first glance Rowland Hughes is a free verse poet. But is this first poem as free as all that? The lines are all approximately the same length and each stanza has the same number of lines. So there is a certain amount of regularity there. Perhaps enough to act as a counterbalance to the prevailing irregularity. And isn't that after all all one needs?
In addition there is a very skillful use of rhyme beginning in the third stanza. Here a heavy rhyme is used so lightly you barely notice it. At the end…
This is wonderful stuff. What more can I say?