Before dawn and all is still, <br />More motionless against the slow film <br />of the thin clouded sky. <br />A dog bark from the valley below <br />And the church’s bell hollows its ancient call. <br />A blue mist lies on the sleeping muscled hills <br />The pale gold horizon is broken <br />by a diamond burst <br />of the sun’s first rays. <br />Morning draws a breeze <br />And the tree’s leaves shiver <br /> <br />The snagging metal of the circular saw <br />Rattles through the morning and <br />A convoy of cars sets off to <br />Snake through ribbon roads. <br />Leathered hills are smooth hips and smooth thighs <br />Baked and golden. <br /> <br />We have stood in stony towns beneath thunder bursts <br />And dipped and flapped in hillside pools of blue. <br />We have gaggled through tourist towns <br />And wiped sticky ice cream fists <br />We have wined, watered, espressoed and cappuccinoed: <br />We have grazied, pregoed, scusied and molte beneed. <br />And the deadened drums of our <br />flattened vowels stumble, <br />like a drunk, stiff with drink, <br />through the towns’ lazy lollop <br />and staccato stutter. <br /> <br />The hours of the evening glide by. <br />And we gaze. <br />Gaze on the hills lunar ripples, <br />On the powdered sky <br />On silver mountain silhouettes <br />Through pink light and shadow tips. <br /> <br />Night falls and hill top towns <br />Turn to blurred reflections <br />of the starred sky. <br />Our laughter disappears into the cool night <br />And a little drunk we fall to our beds. <br /> <br />But this place is not our home. <br />We sit posted on this hill <br />Viewing the Tuscan world <br />And yet <br />these hills, this sun these memories <br />have tinged our blood. <br />Each childish moment <br />eagerly snapped or filmed <br />will be shared in weeks and months and years. <br />And the same sun and moon <br />will lookdown on us then <br />As looks down on us now <br />On this hill and <br />On this day<br /><br />Colm Flanagan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-tuscan-day-on-a-tuscan-hill/
