A walk in March woods

In the woods along the stream, following the trails left by boar and deer, dogs listen to the smells in the wind, sniff the sounds. Dogs of the bare Spanish hills, where they could see for horizons, watch the encroaching trees warily, the green-furred trunks, listen to the damp crackle of dead wood, fallen leaves.

The stream is low in its bed, steep-sided, deep, where trees throw their branches in chaotic dance, water running, light-voiced, leaping obstacles not carrying all in its path.

This green light calls from a misty time mossy and ancient. Dogs hear but the voice is foreign. Their heads turn to the wood’s edge and the meadow pitted with badger holes, deer scrapes and the tender pressed grass of hare forms.

They turn, look down at that dark edge overhung with bramble and hedged with butcher’s broom and a forest of oak saplings. The woods stare back. Darkly.

Woods

A place, dim-green, moss-damp,
perspectives shift where trunks march,
and the bird calls echo
high in black branch-tangle.

Those who walked here are hid now,
the earth dug for worms and mice,
here a scattering of black feathers,
leaving us with the silence.