"KROKJUVET"
Kook=hook; Juv= gorge; et = the.
Margaret Ann Waddicor 4th may 2011

The wrinkled leaves can be 
so very very beautiful 
they never cease to fascinate me,
hanging there from the years before 
curled in the most wonderful twists 
and veined patterns shapes that 
Art Nouveau artists would love to use 
in their blown glass and turned metals;
their colours of bronze, copper and iron,
their textures of polished leather 
and burnished gold, and like the shining 
rust red crysallis, 
who perhaps hides within the curl
unfurls to be new life, a butterfly, a moth
and the leaf's spirit flies again 
in the winds of fortune
for another year.

The bare roots are steps to the rest of the path,
their weather worn barks gone
shaped in sculptures of fairy tale galleons 
and trolls
they too take their roles in my life 
as collectors pieces 
that fill up my middle upstairs room 
with extraordinary heaps of wood.

Hook gorge is where the river suddenly takes a turn 
from going due south, to east 
in a right angle bend 
deep in a little gorge of sheer grey rock, 
where once the beavers made their many paths 
through the beaver-deep bilberries 
and where the pale lichens grow into little woods 
across the glacial stones; 

there below the waterfall that thunders its presence 
to be dulled when the corner is turned, 
the waters dance and swirl round boulders 
to end up in one long black smoothed marble-like polish 
slowly carrying the necklaces of bubbles out 
to where it catches the blue of the sky 
and becomes the decorative backcloth 
for the young green firs and birches. 

This was one of our favourite haunts, 
until 
they put up HUGE PYLONS 
that devastated the wood 
and left the intimate gorge bare and hollow in feeling.

Progress, 
I cannot think that the pylon engineers 
had ever sensed the most wonderful atmosphere 
of this little gem of nature, 
they ignored it, 
and only the locals even knew about it, 
hidden as it was, 
although not far from the road.