This is a wild land, country of my choice, <br />With harsh craggy mountain, moor ample and bare. <br />Seldom in these acres is heard any voice <br />But voice of cold water that runs here and there <br />Through rocks and lank heather growing without care. <br />No mice in the heath run nor no birds cry <br />For fear of the dark speck that floats in the sky. <br /> <br />He soars and he hovers rocking on his wings, <br />He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, <br />He catches the trembling of small hidden things, <br />He tears them in pieces dropping from the sky: <br />Tenderness and pity the land will deny, <br />Where life is but nourished from water and rock, <br />A hardy adventure, full of fear and shock. <br /> <br />Time has never journeyed to this lost land, <br />Crakeberries and heather bloom out of date, <br />The rocks jut, the streams flow singing on either hand, <br />Careless if the season be early or late. <br />The skies wander overhead, now blue now slate: <br />Winter would be known by his cold cutting snow <br />If June did not borrow his armour also. <br /> <br />Yet this is my country beloved by me best, <br />The first land that rose from Chaos and the Flood, <br />Nursing no fat valleys for comfort and rest, <br />Trampled by no hard hooves, stained with no blood <br />Bold immortal country whose hill-tops have stood <br />Strongholds for the proud gods when on earth they go, <br />Terror for fat burghers in far plains below.<br /><br />Robert Graves<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/rocky-acres/
