Llanbwchllyn Lake

[milo]

White and yellow water-lilies framing
sky upon its surface; sun and moon
fragmented, swept off to the edges.

there is an odd tense confusion here created by the contrast of framing/fragmented. This is also a sentence fragment. As a reader, I am left wondering why the narrator mentions this in the beginning of the poem as it is never tied in. It is also strange when you skip articles sometimes and not others.

Above us in the heather a cluster
of wild horses flash their tails at flies
in the flattening heat. A bird of prey circles,

flattening heat is good. "Above us in the heather" . . . ahh, a poem about a family of bugs. I do love a good bug poem. I don't know about "flash" with tails, while I love inventive usage, this one feels wrong.

swoops and arouses maternal concern
for the children below; nakedness splashes
the dignity of mallards and mute swans.

"bird of prey"? You recognised the flora but not the fauna? Why not an egret, a falcon, a kestrel? "maternal concern" is just tell and prosaic at that. "nakedness splashes"? Nakedness is just a condition it can't splash. This would be like "handsomeness splashes".

Deep in the night the call of the screech owl,
stars as large as her eyes.

more sentence fragments.

“This is what life could be like…” she whispered,
“…without you,” I manfully ended her sentence.

What you have here is a ton of scene setting and no plot. I don't know your narrator and their companion other than that they might be bugs.

As a whole, this is very, very loose. It needs some sever triage with a direction toward intent, narrative train and grammar as well as word usage to succeed.

Thanks for posting.