View from Sharp Haw Summit

This land, glowing softly, with thin smoke rising
is, at this late hour, breath-
lessly still.

These rollings, ripples, muscles,
surges, waves - snapshot still - are hills,
drumlins, glacier-old, now quiet, asleep.
Each one with its trimmed copse canopy,
at its best in the sunset moment.

Trees push together
to get into the shot,
posing in knots on sculpted crests.

Background fells, clean-cut
under the scratched ice sun,
in a different time entirely,
follow their unknown plots.

But in front of these fells,
dimpling over acres, over miles, leagues on leagues
lie the drumlins

and the sun, gently,
gradually in its careful craft
paints the shadowed oils of still, sleeping, silent
drumlin-land

until - quite suddenly -
snickering, swooping,v just in from Africa,
a painted lady - mad with the joy of it -
shivers on my boot leather.

© 2018 Rob Hawley