Falling Through Water & Mountain Stream

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.