A Stroud Valleys Christmas

There is a poem below called A Stroud Valleys Christmas, but first I would like to draw your early attention to our first collective walk, when we map, record and re-imagine the landscape. This will be on Twelfth Night, Sunday January 6^th. By then, our website at www.radicalstroud.org.uk  should be moving beyond work in progress: that is the place where we shall place our collaborative multi-media interpretations of our locality. Further details about the walk – meeting point, route, mileage and so on, will follow, both  on the blog and the website; but for the moment, let us all enjoy Christmas-Tide, remembering that the poem below could become a half-forgotten memory if building takes place in the Slad Valley.

A Stroud Valleys Christmas

One damp, December Sunday afternoon,

I biked out through Stroud’s featureless streets,

And then along the Slad Valley to Bull’s Cross:

Past shooting, pollarded willow trees,

All lined along the lanes;

Past well wrapped figures stacking yuletide logs,

All shrouded in a coppice;

Past the chapels turned to guest houses,

Their graveyards full of cars;

Past families cutting mistletoe,

Their long handled secateurs silhouetted

Against the setting sun’s cloudscape;

Past rooks, gathering in the gathering dusk,

All calling in the copse -

Until, all was still and silent,

At sunset;

That moment,

When all life seems to be suspended.

I listened to the silence,

Then turned my bike for home.

And when I returned to Stroud in darkness,

Nocturnal winter-spring had sprung:

Every window was now ablaze with lights,

And glittering trees and candles;

Doors were hung with stars and wreaths of holly,

Laced with ivy and mistletoe;

Christmas has come!

Cold season’s magic!