As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

by Laurie Lee

Vigo was cold and dim, an unlighted ruin, already smothered in the dead blue dusk. Only the sky and the ocean stayed alive, running with immense streams of flame. Then as the sun went down it seemed to drag the whole sky with it like the shreds of a burning curtain, leaving rags of bright water that went on smoking and smouldering along the estuaries and around the many islands. I saw the small white ship, my last link with home, flare like a taper and die away in the darkness; then I was alone at last, sitting on a hilltop, my teeth chattering as the night wind rose.

I saw the steamy, damp-uddered cows of home planting their pink-lily mouths in the brook, then standing, knee-deep among dragonflies, whipping the reeds with their tasselled tails. Images bubbled up green from valleys of shining rain and fields of storm-crushed grass, with streams running down from the lime-cold hills into buttery swamps of flowers.