LANDSCAPES WITH FIGURES
Just beyond the redundant sandstone seawall
a stonechat flies from reed to reed – golden now
for autumn – singing its brief notes with each flight.
In hidden lagoons among the reed beds
are thousands of migrants, pink-footed geese –
with their incessant, metallic chattering –
wintering from Greenland and from Iceland.
***
Swaddled we bask on a secluded bench
facing the westering sun, which glints
on the river’s one navigable channel
mercurial on the opposite bank.
Even in clear weather the far coast
is too distant to be detailed. Today’s
light haze obfuscates its hilly fields
and three small towns – except for a sixties
high-rise of slum-clearance social housing
that looms, eyeless, like a far off grave marker.
***
Out of some profound lake filled from mountain moors
an ice age made, the river rushes white,
over scattered glacial debris,
through a long, deep limestone vale, flows
past oak woods and stands of willows, edges
pastureland and industrial estates to shape
this vast estuarial landscape – that today
is gold and quicksilver.
Harvey Lillywhite
October 31, 2025OK, last comment.
A kind of seamless fusion of natural observation, human presence, and geological time, right?
The poem’s precision – ‘a stonechat flies from reed to reed’, ‘pink-footed geese… chattering’ —
recalls the patient eye of a painter.
The middle section’s ‘swaddled’ figures basking in the sun introduce a gentle intimacy that contrasts with the vast, impersonal landscape.
The final stanza deepens the poem’s scope, tracing the river from Ice Age origins to modern industry, uniting deep time with fleeting perception.
Its language- ‘gold and quicksilver’ — shimmers with realism and quiet transcendence; the ordinary scene feels mythic and enduring.
Ha…I knew my major in English lit would serve me well someday.
Thanks for this poem!
John HUDDART
November 5, 2025All one poem – 360 degrees of observation, 4 dimensions of thought. Transcends the ordinary. And Harvey at his best too!
David Press
November 10, 2025So much to love in this!
I agree with John Huddart’s comment, but as well as 360 degrees observation you use a zoom lens from close up to satellite image, which makes it vast. Then you place the swaddled figures! You can’t avoid thinking of swaddled babies, yet these figures are probably old. As Harvey says, an intimate image. Soaking up the sun as autumn progresses.
A beautiful evocation of the passage of time put alongside the redundant stone wall, grave marker block of flats, and ice age formed lake and river.
Thank you for a lovely poem.
Jeff Teasdale
November 17, 2025Thank you, David… another wonderfully crafted visual image in words.
Similarly two days ago, after ‘Claudia’ had battered our house, with our friends from land-locked Chorley huddled on the sofa feeling quite alarmed at the force of it and its action upon the bent trees of Ynys Gybi (no doubt laughing that their soft-rooted Cheshire counterparts were being uprooted in Macclesfield) and then sending us staggering out onto the vast rock landscape of Holyhead Mountain and taking the full force of it, but in its stride, as the water in the gullies and cracks running down South Stack were blown back into reverse waterfalls to fall again, and no sign of life except for us few humans sheltering in the RSPB Cafe… Everything else sensibly lying low.
And then flat calm. She’d gone, spinning away up what we might now call The Celtic Sea… Sunday morning dawns, late, grey and beige with views to the Llyn and Snowdon that our friends never saw; phalanxes of geese have started heading south again, probably from Martin Mere (near their Chorley); our two choughs arguing on a rock; a family of fragile oystercatchers scurrying around Rhoscolyn beach near a dead seal – the pounding too much for it, obviously, and the sea a solid grey slab again.
Landscape painter Huw and his wife were keen to talk about the cow in their garden eating their lawn at the end of the beach… “Well, it’s only a field really, so she’s saving us a job…”… he says, waiting for Keith the farmer to collect her… “She’s a wanderer, that one!”… We find her droppings all over all the paths, small details that one might only experience in the winter.
We are the only two people on the beach… perfect stillness, no wind, little colour, no tourists… car park empty, car park toilet locked, car park flooded. Crow pecking at the seal. Life goes on…