At the time this was probably the most beautiful place I'd visited on Earth - and nearly 10 years later it's still up there with the best.

Stolen

Beautiful;
I would not envisage this in a dreamy delusion -
it is not a hazy-hallucination!
Confirmed by sun shining from blue skies
beautifully blemished by white-wisps;
it's a paradise I'd never imagined.

Serene sound;
Sprinkling, splashing, dousing, washing -
nourishing water hushing like silk over stone,
traversing without care, for it is free!
A smell so cool and fresh, cup your hands
and taste its innocence.

Air, water, flower and stone in harmony create perfection.
The Garden of Eden's far-richer relation -
flourishes of heathers and trees and grass,
Shangri-La's European cousin, but this one is real -
a green utopia of untouched elation.

Breathless;
If I wasn't below the clouds,
I'd believe this was heaven.

Though;
To see the skies angered,
overcome by grey,
to see this gentle brute
escape its boundaries and power!
Rains fall – thunderstorm!
Water bounds like petrol bombs,
coarse crashing irrigations
against a rocky facia floods the plain!

The falls have stolen my heart;
My heart can stay.

Inspired, But No Pen!

This poem nearly didn’t happen. It was hot. The sky was a brilliant blue, the ground a verdant green. I was overwhelmed and inspired, but I didn't have a pen! The day passed with more sightseeing, then back to the tent to cook, eat and sleep. The potential poem was forgotten about for a few more days until one late afternoon at home a few days later, when I suddenly had the urge to write the poem I hadn’t been able to write on the day.

It all came out in a few minutes, and I think it's the first proper poem I ever wrote, excluding anything I did at school. Up until Stolen, I’d only written a few lyrics, and conversed in Haiku over e-mail at work for a laugh. There are definitely a few lines I’d change if I edited it (e.g. “petrol bombs”), but hopefully it's not too bad.

P.S. These photos weren’t taken with enough megapixels to be available for anything but small prints. Photography wasn’t even a hobby in those days and photos were just a record of where I’d been. Perhaps that’s why I was inspired to capture the waterfall in words...

I edited Stolen in 2020.

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