Mark Scrivener Poetry Blog No 1 Treewind and Storm

                        TREEWIND AND STORM

How far have we come in modern civilisation from any real relationship to the world around us? That is in respect of our feelings, our hearts and imaginations and a sense of living relationship to the events of nature around us? These are the questions that prompted this poem- Treewind and Storm. It was originally written after experiencing an arising storm on the top of a hill at Mona Vale on the Northern Beaches of Sydney decades ago. 

TREEWIND AND STORM

I walked one night

far from day walls,

onto the top

of a street-scarred hill.

Under me dwindled

lines of dead lights:

silence of still

fragments of city,

quietened by darkness.

Yet where I stood, hill-high,

the wind tore through dark sky:

as ever-free, arousing force,

a celebration of life's source.

Fresh on my face,

tingling my skin,

it swayed the dark, bare trees,

endowing their dead branches

with strange and living gestures.

It shook the roadside bushes,

endowing their thin leaves

with a million, whispering voices;

and distant thunder gave the very sky

deep tones of muttering discourse.

And the cloud-sullened vastness

gleamed with storm joy.

I felt my limbs

strong like the treewind.

I felt my heart

sing with the skywind.

I felt my blood

pulse with storm power;

my being bound to boundlessness.

But beneath slunk sadlit streets

where time was passed in dullness;

where we live like ghosts,

close-hidden from night,

in trance to the spell of the talking,

hypnotic screen's pale light.