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Rob Hudson

Conceptual landscape photography from Wales

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Mametz Wood

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About Mametz Wood

And so to midnight and into the ebb-time when the spirit slips lightly from sick men and when it's like no-mans-land between yesterday and tomorrow and material things are loosely integrated and barely tacked together.

and in the core and navel of the wood there seemed a vacuum, if you stayed quite still, as though you'd come on ancient stillnesses in his most interior place.

You can't see anything but sheen on drifting particles and you move forward in your private bright cloud like one assumed who is borne up by an exterior volition.

The queen of the woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering. These knew her influential eyes. Her awarding hands can pluck for each their fragile prize.

But sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered.

From deeply inward thumping all through you beating no peace to be still in and no one is there not anyone to stop can't anyone turn off the tap or won't anyone before it snaps.

His light stick-bomb winged above your thorn-bush, and aged oak-timbers shiver and leaves shower like thrown blossom for a conqueror.

He sinks on one knee and now on the other,  his upper body tilts in rigid inclination this way and back; weighted lanyard runs out full tether,  swings like a pendulum and the clock runs down.

where his traversing machine-guns perforate to powder white- white creature of chalk pounded and the world crumbled away

as to this hour           when unicorns break cover and come down and foxes flee, whose warrens know the shock,  and birds complain in flight - for their nests fall like stars          and all t

Cloud shielded her bright disc-rising yet her veiled influence illuminated the texture of that place.

His eyes set on the hollow night beyond.

Dead-calm for this Sargasso dank, and for the creeping things. You can hear the silence of it.

Suffer with us this metamorphosis.

Like an home-reared animal in a quiet nook, before his day came... before entering into the prison of earth.

Stealthily, imperceptibly, stript back thinning night wraps unshrouding, unsheafing  and insubstantial barriers dissolve.

$His lamps hang in this black cold and hang so still; with this still rain slow–moving vapours wreathe to reflect their clear ray – like through glassy walls that slowly turn they rise and fracture – for this fog-smoke wraith they cast a dismal sheen$

Where their faces turned, grey weald earth almost of last clung weeds of  night weft      behind them the stars still shined.

And the surfeit of fear steadies to dumb incognition.

When the quiet came again with the sudden cessation – in the tensioned silence afterwards you couldn’t find a rag of them.

In the regions of air above the trajectory zone, the birds chattering heard for all the drum-fire counter the malice of the engines.

As a malign chronometer, ticking off with each discharge an exactly measured progress toward a certain and prearranged hour of apocalypse.

hen men sense how they stand so perilous and transitory in this world.

Oddly stirred winds gusted coolish to your face that might have borne things webbed and blind or the grey owl suddenly.

Fear will so condition you that you each will pale for the other, and in one another you will hate your own flesh.

Men went to Catraeth as day dawned: their fears disturbed their peace. Men went to Catraeth: free of speech was their host...death's sure meeting place, the goal of their marching.

A whole unlovely order this night would transubstantiate, lend some grace to.

The other slope was still sun-lighted, but it was getting almost cool on this east-facing hill, and the creeping down and so across so gradually, gathered to itself, minute by minute, the lesser cast-shadows, the little glints and smallnesses, garne

The sky flickered uncertainly, as when summer lightenings dance.

And conflagrations change the shape of the sky.

And blackened men ran between the falling stars.

Your fair natures will be so disguised that the aspect of his eyes will pry like deep-sea horrors divers see.

Across the evening, homing birds, birds of the air with nests cawed on high above them waiting.

Hour on hour the gunfire did not relax nor lessen, in fact took on a more tremendous depth.

The inorganic earth where your body presses seems itself to pulse deep down with your heart's acceleration.

And tough root-fibres boomerang to top-most green filigree and earth clods flung disturb the fresh fragile shoots that brush the sky.

Late -flowering dog-rose spray let fly like bowyer's ash, disturbed for the movement for the pressing forward, bodies in the bower where adolescence walks the shrieking wood.

Who under the green tree had awareness of his dismembering, and deep-bowelled damage; for whom the green tree bore scarlet memorial, and herb and arborage waste.

Could he too retch up his heart at this whispering of fixed-stars frighted.

But for the most part they come as sleep-walkers whose bodies go unbidden of the mind, without malevolence, seeking only rest.

So these nineteen depoly between the rowan and the hazel,  go forward to the deeper shades.

And cork-screwed stapled trip-wire to snare among the briars and iron warp with bramble weft with meadow-sweet and lady-smock for a fair camouflage.

There between the thinning uprights at the margin straggle tangled oak and flayed sheeney beech-bole, and fragile birch whose silver queenery is draggled and ungraced and June shoots lopt amd fresh stalks bled

You huddle closer to your mossy bed you make yourself scarce you scramble forward and pretend not to see,  but ruby drops from young beech-sprigs- are bright your hands and face.

You drop apprehensively - the sun gone out,  strange airs smite your body and muck rains straight from heaven.

and twice-dye with crimson moistening for draggled bloodwort and the madder sorrel.

Long side by side like dear friends lie on daisy-down on warm days cuddled down kindly close with the mole in down and silky rodent,  and if you look more intimately all manner of small creatures,  created-dear things creep about quit

So many without memento beneath the tumuli on the high hills and under the harvest places.