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.