Dartmoor Dreaming
Night pillows me between extremities.
North, the bleak wet playground of the Moor
loamy with fog and ancient history
its richest crop the bumper sprawl
of tourist cars, a rash of chrome
in prickly summer heat. Its season
is out of season.
South
the dual carriageway’s drone-and-whistle
throbs a splinter under the nail of sleep.
Its season is convenience.
I dream violence
a sudden severing of slip-roads
tyre scream, eel-twitch of tarmac
pumping tail-backs. Cities
dislocate, drift apart.
Silence.
A clockless aeon later
out on the Moor, in moonrise
thunder and rainstorm, a megalith
stirs, yawns, opens mica-shot
and blood-hungry eyes, heaves
granite bulk inch by heathery
gorse and bracken inch
straight for town.
Roger is an artist-tutor painting and teaching at his studio in Chudleigh. He won the 2014 Poetry Society National Poetry Competition with “Corkscrew Hill Photo,” set in rural south Devon. He was longlisted in the 2015 National Poetry Competition, and has contributed both paintings and poems to the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Art-and- Poetry event/exhibition 2016.
