para amanhã. ‘For tomorrow’ in Portuguese.

A very apt name, while I am working on planning and designing what you will see here.

A selection of poems, stories, photos and paintings will be growing here. I hope you like what you find.

Lost on Godolphin Hill

Ancient old mound, two views of the sea

Gloom gathering fast all around

Voices of men from this land now long free

A whispering, half imagined sound

Hard granite bones push through soft verdant flesh

Long dead hands pulled the copper from this ground

It seems the paths from this hill that led me up here

Once lost can never be found.

poem by Justin Durant

‘Cornish Moor’ mixed media painting by Lorraine Durant

I went with Lorraine for a ‘short walk’ from the cottage where we were staying in St. Hilary, a small village in West Cornwall. It was late afternoon on our first day there. We strolled through the beautiful Cornish countryside, admiring the impressive disused copper mining buildings dotted around.

Unexpectedly, having unknowingly taken a wrong turn, we arrived at the base of a beautifully shaped hill. We couldn’t resist, so climbed up to the summit which commanded great views of the surrounding land. To the West we could see St. Michael’s Mount in Mount’s Bay, near Penzance. To the East, lights twinkling in St. Ives Bay.

It was dusk, the light was now poor. Somehow, we descended by the wrong path to a dead end. We re-climbed the hill. We tried two more paths down the hill, neither of which returned us to our starting point. With dark approaching, we stood on the summit of Godolphin Hill, feeling very lost…