Today's poem

A five-hour power cut has eaten all my blogging time. So I'm offering this as today's post.

ON LOOKOUT POINT, SILVERMINE

White wind smokes the beach a long way down and off
the dizzy upthrust of bare rock reared over the firewatch hut.
Yet not bare. Life clings even to the perpendicular:
showers of flowers, founts of grass decline to gravity
yet persist, last-ditch stands bought on invisible niches.
Hunched in my niche under the wind, I drink the force
that split the mountain. I am nourished in its deep silence,
a moment of shock that shudders all the way back to creation.
In this great gasp of time plant, flesh and stone occupy
a brief note drawn by a bellows filling
with voluptuous
temporary
air.