Burial

The spade slips in, sharp as flint,
into the black-tide earth, where bramble-thorn
grips the muck's throat, tangles and drags.
Sun's caught in curdled clouds,
held like a breath, a prisoner in the hollow,
bleak as an oyster’s bone-bleached lip.
The hill’s black ridge curves—crowscratch,
hard-inked across the sky’s pale bile sheen.
Closer, the ground stirs, a rough scrape of briar,
paths clawed by fox, nettle-choked, unforgiven.
The cold sweat of mist licks the gorse’s wretched hide
and the land, a restive sleeper, shifts and heaves.

Here, in the duskfall’s bruise, the dark
spills over the edge of the light, and night
creeps up through the tangled ruts, thick
as peat-smoke, deepening.

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I re-read some "Under Milk Wood" and a bit of Seamus Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist", after being enthused by the wonderful poetry of Queen Beatle.

I had also seen some magical paintings by an artist I admire on Instagram called Rachel Mia Allen which tied in perfectly with that evocation of an almost silhouetted landscape at dusk, perhaps near the sea, with suggestions of weathered and worn wood and wild barbed bramble that sits threatening in its own darkness.