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Towering trees touch the clear sky with icy fingers
Crowding like an army of soldiers
A glistening glimmer of water glimpsed through
Motionless trees standing to attention
Pale sun pushes its way through the canopy
Weak spotlights filtering through branches -
Dappled shade.
A maze of life
White figures float in the frozen air -
Seagulls squabble as they duck and dive
Swans as white as snow
Fly sharp as a dart then
Glide - elegant, peaceful, swift, silent
Graceful
Gently caressing the water
Beady eyes as dark as midnight
Cormorant silhouetted still as a statue against the icy sky
Feathers blowing in the breeze
Coot, flaming eyes like embers in a fire
Irridescent metallic mallards.
Ripples chase the sun like a shadow
Rainbow circles glisten in the calm water
Reflections like magical illusions
Year 6 St Catherines Primary School, Heathfield
Audio Version of the poem
Charles Kingsley
(1819–1875)
Kingsley was born in Devon at Holne, on Dartmoor, but moved away a few years later. He returned later in 1830 to the coastal village of Clovelly. He was a clergyman and writer, with a strong interest in nature, history, and social justice and reform, which is evident across his work.
Unusually, instead of a book being named after a place, the town of Westward Ho! is named after Kingsley’s novel of the same name. The novel’s beginning, is however, set a few miles up the coast in Bideford.
“Waterbabies” too, is said to have originated with his love of the coast, also
evident in his essay “North Devon”.
Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Jenna Plewes
Over Dartmoor on a Snowy Night
Across the high moor, sheeted for winter,
a solitary car snails through the falling snow,
its trail glistens briefly in the tail lights,
cats eyes, heavy lidded, glimmer ahead,
fistfuls of bright needles are swept by the wipers
into an endless tunnel of darkness
while sealed within, music rises and falls
weaving a magic of sunshine and warmth.
Jenna Plewes
Springtime on the Moor
Bluebells flow down the valley
pooling round clumps of gorse
incandescent among rocks
molten millennia beyond millennia,
age spotted with lichen, half buried in time.
Perched on warm granite
in a blue gold sea of sunlight and birdsong
I freeze frame the moment
before it joins cloud shadows
racing across the moor.
by Jenna Plewes
Dartmoor
The moor, bare-breasted and sun-soaked
lies lizard-like
watching buzzards swirling in the bowl of the sky
while tors, like silent druids
weave a magic
innocent in sunlight,
dangerous in the dark.
Shrouded in mist, she greets her ghosts,
whispering in lichen-bearded Wistman’s wood,
struggling in the lime green clutch of Cranmere Pool
stumbling from Princetown’s prison cells
to wander lost and lonely mile on mile,
the last to come
pacing the rows of standing stones
the ancient ones
walk in the mist and driving rain
casting no shadows while the sun is high.
