Roderick Manson

Broad Moss is an unremarkable little hill rising to the north of the village of Rattray in Perthshire which I have been strolling over while restrictions are ongoing.  I wrote this atop the (near the) summit trig point on Saturday [23 Jan] as a sort of muse on the theme that everything and every moment is new if we choose to look at it in the right way, even if we have been up that hill innumerable times before.  And, yes, the event alluded to in the first stanza really did occur – I plead thick cloud and c 40 yard visibility.

The homepage picture was taken from the same trig point by Garry Manson a week after the poem was written and looks west to Ben Vrackie, Ben Vuirich and Beinn A’ Ghlo

Broad Moss

I follow footsteps,
which may be my own,
into the mire of last week,
half-ghosting a trig point
through the droplets and molecules
casually hanging around,
then it moved
and bleated
and, yet again,
I had cause to doubt what I knew.

I looked at the views
that were not there,
those views snow-blinding me now:
I do not go to the mountains
to make anything new;
the mountains’ call me to witness
the new they have created for me.