marvellous, thanks I missed that and hadn't come across it beforeQuote:
Originally Posted by Hes
Printable View
marvellous, thanks I missed that and hadn't come across it beforeQuote:
Originally Posted by Hes
For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
A poem to listen to on a driek day like today and a bit of romance thrown in to!.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6_9V_nkZXM
Very nice. Its flipping miserable here today. I'm plucking up courage to go down the garden to the studio.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
Not very cheery but a beautiful poem about love lost.
Sounds of the Day
When a clatter came,
it was horses crossing the ford.
When the air creaked, it was
a lapwing seeing us off the premises
of its private marsh. A snuffling puff
ten yards from the boat was the tide blocking and
unblocking a hole in a rock.
When the black drums rolled, it was water
falling sixty feet into itself.
When the door
scraped shut, it was the end
of all the sounds there are.
You left me
beside the quietest fire in the world.
I thought I was hurt in my pride only,
forgetting that,
when you plunge your hand in freezing water,
you feel
a bangle of ice round your wrist
before the whole hand goes numb.
Norman MacCaig
He does tend to be rather melancholic - but I kinda like that :).Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
Here's another that won't set you chortling either...
AFTER
Let’s choose a pretty word, say, evening,
And climb through it into the past,
or stand on a towering If, surveying
The rosy kingdoms we have lost.
From every corner creep a thousand
Boredoms saying, Greet us. We’re life.
Let’s round the sunset up and milk it
Into a jug and drink it off.
Or in the hawthorn let us tangle
Our dreary look like gossamer
To shudder with that sparrow’s chirping
And when the dew falls be on fire.
Or drag the distance home and chain it
There in the corner of the room
To charm us with its savage howling
And beg for fragments of our dream.
There’s a clue somewhere. Can you find it?
Can you say it over and over again
‘Love’, till its incantation makes us
Forget how much we are alone?
Norman MacCaig.
Ah! A sense of humour and a new perspective...
ROOMS – Billy Collins
After three days of steady, inconsolable rain,
I walk through the rooms of the house
wondering which would be best to die in.
The study is an obvious choice
with its thick carpet and soothing paint,
its overstuffed chair preferable
to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.
And the kitchen has a certain appeal –
it seems he was boiling water for tea,
the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle.
Then there is the dining room,
just the place to end up facedown
at one end of its long table in a half-written letter
or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep,
upright against the headboard,
a book having slipped to the floor –
make it Mrs. Dalloway, which I have yet to read.
Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles,
dead on the stone cold floor –
it’s starting to sound like a ballad
sung in a pub by a man with a coal red face.
It’s all the fault of the freezing rain
which is flicking against the windows,
but when it finally lets up
and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze,
when the trees stand dripping in the light,
I will quit these dark, angular rooms
and drive along a country road
into the larger rooms of the world,
so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow –
a road that cuts through bare woods
and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet
these late November days.
And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves
there is hidden a nest of mice,
each one no bigger than a thumb,
a thumb with closed eyes,
a thumb with whiskers and a tail,
each one contemplating the sweetness of grass
and the startling brevity of life.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road
Healthy , Free ,the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading
whever I choose
Henceforth I ask not good fortune,I myself am
good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more,postpone no
more,need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints,libaries,
querulous critisms
Strong and contentI travel the open road.
hi there ! I hope you are all keeping well. I haven't been on in ages but thought I d just check in...I absolutely adored this poem just what the doctor ordered for a tired pre Xmas mum xxQuote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
funny to see this thread revived...just been reading this:
"Candles of gnarled resin, apple branches, the tacky
mistletoe. 'Look' they said and again 'look'. But
I ran slowly; the landscape flowed away, back to
its source."
Geoffrey Hill. Mercian Hymns.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave_Mole
Thats beautiful
The Bright Field’
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
R. S. Thomas
A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.
II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Some lovely choices, I particularly like the RS Thomas. Its that time of year again, the curlews are back!
Curlew
The curve of its cry—
A sculpture
Of the long beak
A spiral carved from bone.
It is raised
quickening
From the ground,
Is wound high, and again unwound,
down
To the stalker nodding
In a marshy field.
It is the welling
Of a cold mineral spring,
Salt from the estuary
Dissolved, sharpening
The fresh vein bubbling on stone.
It is an echo
Repeating an echo
That calls you back.
It looses
Words from dust till the live tongue
Cry: This is mine
Not mine, this life
Welling from springs
Under ground, spiraling
Up the long flight of bone.
Jeremy Hooker
That's really wonderful - thanks for posting Hes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hes
The Primrose
By Caroline Southey (1787–1854)
I saw it in my evening walk,
A little lonely flower!
Under a hollow bank it grew,
Deep in a mossy bower.
An oak’s gnarl’d root, to roof the cave
With Gothic fretwork sprung,
Whence jewell’d fern, and arum leaves,
And ivy garlands hung.
And from beneath came sparkling out
From a fallen tree’s old shell,
A little rill, that dipt about
The lady in her cell.
And there, methought, with bashful pride,
She seem’d to sit and look
On her own maiden loveliness
Pale imaged in the brook.
No other flower—no rival grew
Beside my pensive maid;
She dwelt alone, a cloister’d nun,
In solitude and shade.
No sunbeam on that fairy well
Darted its dazzling light—
Only, methought, some clear, cold star
Might tremble there at night.
No ruffling wind could reach her there—
No eye, methought, but mine,
Or the young lamb’s that came to drink,
Had spied her secret shrine.
And there was pleasantness to me
In such belief. Cold eyes
That slight dear Nature’s lowliness,
Profane her mysteries.
Long time I looked and linger’d there,
Absorb’d in still delight—
My spirit drank deep quietness
In, with that quiet sight.
A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy
Near
(for N.D.)
Far, we are near, meet in the rain
which falls here; gathered by light, air;
falls there where you are, I am; lips
to those drops now on yours, nearer …
absence the space we yearn in, clouds
drift, cluster, east to west, north, south;
your breath in them; they pour, baptise;
same sun burning through to harvest
rainfall on skin, there, far; my mouth
opening to spell your near name.
It's been such a long time since I wrote anything - total loss of confidence after the last one or two which I read back and hated. Still, such is life.
There's a great lyric in a Radiohead song (Glass Eyes), "...the path trails off and heads down the mountain. I don't know where it goes. I don't really care". I've been trying to write something about just heading out there with no plan and then digging the map out when I've had my fill and figuring out how to get back to the car. It's the best kind of hassle free, pressure free, just free kind of exploratory fellrunning. I'd given up on it but that sentiment got it started again and I ended up with this. Hope it resonates or at the very least, provides a few seconds of mild diversion.
Free
I’m free
To go where I don’t choose to go
Following my feet, my nose, my gut
Protuberances and instincts outranking the map
Demoting it to fourth, at best
Its time will come though
To guide me back to the car
And to freedom-lite that is everyday life
So free
Descending through watering eyes
Picking a line through the outcrops
A line of most assistance, for there is no resistance
In what is innately irresistible
So there’s no need to choose between any of it
Just the freedom to go and keep going
Until you have to come back
Thanks. That was lovely.
Yeap. Nice one. That's what its all about for many of us.Quote:
Originally Posted by OneOffPoet
Love in the Morning
Annie Finch
Morning’s a new bird
stirring against me
out of a quiet nest,
coming to flight—
quick-changing,
slow-nodding,
breath-filling body,
life-holding,
waiting,
clean as clear water,
warmth-given,
fire-driven
kindling companion,
mystery and mountain,
dark-rooted,
earth-anchored.
The Song Of The Ungirt Runners -
Charles Hamilton Sorley
We swing ungirded hips,
And lightened are our eyes,
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
We know not whom we trust
Nor whitherward we fare,
But we run because we must
Through the great wide air.
The waters of the seas
Are troubled as by storm.
The tempest strips the trees
And does not leave them warm.
Does the tearing tempest pause?
Do the tree-tops ask it why?
So we run without a cause
'Neath the big bare sky.
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
But the storm the water whips
And the wave howls to the skies.
The winds arise and strike it
And scatter it like sand,
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
I haven't seen this in such a long time thank you for reminding me...
Recently I have been reading a lot of Norman MacCaig, I think it was this thread that introduced me to him...I love"a poem for a goodbye" and also this...
Incident
Norman MacCaig
I look across the table and think
(fiery with love)
Ask me, go on, ask me
to do something impossible,
something freakishly useless,
something unimaginable and inimitable
Like making a finger break into blossom
or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes
or remembering tomorrow.
I will you to ask it.
But all you say is
Will you give me a cigarette?
And I smile and,
returning to the marvelous world
of possibility
I give you one
with a hand that trembles
with a human trembling.
I taste a liquor never brewed
I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –
When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I shall but drink the more!
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!
Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886
A foolhardy fellow called Stolly
Partook of a spectacular folly
60 days came and went
The Grand Old Duke of Penygent
Is clearly off his trolley
ha ha ha, excellent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Whippet
Sheer poetry in motion Andrew - just like me in fact :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Whippet
Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives —
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
in the night
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daisies,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
That was then, which hasn't ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.
MARY OLIVER
from The Princess: O Swallow
O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.
O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.
O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.
O were I thou that she might take me in,
And lay me on her bosom, and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.
Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,
Delaying as the tender ash delays
To clothe herself, when all the woods are green?
O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown:
Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,
But in the North long since my nest is made.
O tell her, brief is life but love is long,
And brief the sun of summer in the North,
And brief the moon of beauty in the South.
O Swallow, flying from the golden woods,
Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine,
And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Mercies
She might have had months left of her dog-years,
but to be who? She’d grown light as a nest
and spent the whole day under her long ears
listening to the bad radio in her breast.
On the steel bench, knowing what was taking shape
she tried and tried to stand, as if to sign
that she was still of use, and should escape
our selection. So I turned her face to mine,
and seeing only love there – which, for all
the wolf in her, she knew as well as we did –
she lay back down and let the needle enter.
And love was surely what her eyes conceded
as her stare grew hard, and one bright aerial
quit making its report back to the centre.
Don Paterson
Beautifully put if incredibly sad. A day I dread I may have to face.
"Two Pewits"
Under the after-sunset sky
Two pewits sport and cry,
More white than is the moon on high
Riding the dark surge silently;
More black than earth. Their cry
Is the one sound under the sky.
They alone move, now low, now high,
And merrily they cry
To the mischievous Spring sky,
Plunging earthward, tossing high,
Over the ghost who wonders why
So merrily they cry and fly,
Nor choose 'twixt earth and sky,
While the moon's quarter silently
Rides, and earth rests as silently.
Edward Thomas
For all head-torchers whose batteries start to go on the blink somewhere on t'fells!
Out in the Dark
by Edward Thomas
Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe ;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.
Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when the lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned ;
And star and I and wind and deer,
Are in the dark together, - near,
Yet far, - and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.
How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.
I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
And all trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in
I had me a man in summertime
He had summer-colored skin
And not another girl in town
My darling's heart could win
But when the leaves fell on the ground
And bully winds came around pushed them face down in the snow
He got the urge for going and I had to let him go
He got the urge for going
When the meadow grass was turning brown
And summertime was falling down and winter was closing in
Now the warriors of winter they gave a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight flapping and racing on before the snow
They've got the urge for going and they've got the wings so they can go
They get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in
I'll ply the fire with kindling and pull the blankets to my chin
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and I'll bolt my wandering in
I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she's got the urge for going so I guess she'll have to go
She get the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown
And all her empires are falling down
And winter's closing in
And I get the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown
And summertime is falling down
Not a poem but the lyrics of Urge For Going by Joni Mitchell.
Dib Dib Dib Dob Dob Dob
Baden-Powell falls to the mob.
LB 2020
Sea to the West
When the sea’s to the west
The evenings are one dazzle –
You can find no sign of water.
Sun upflows the horizon;
Waves of shine
Heave, crest, fracture,
Explode on the shore;
The wide day burns.
In the incandescent mantle of the air.
Once, fifteen,
I would lean on handlebars,
Staring into the flare,
Blinded by looking,
Letting the gutterings and sykes of light
Flood into my skull.
Then, on the stroke of bedtime,
I’d turn to the town,
Cycle past purpling dykes
To a brown drizzle
Where black-scum shadows
Stagnated between backyard walls.
I pulled the warm dark over my head
Like an eiderdown.
Yet in that final stare when I
(Five times, perhaps, fifteen)
Creak protesting away –
The sea to the west,
The land darkening –
Let my eyes at the last be blinded
Not by the dark
But by the dazzle.
Norman Nicholson
Great choice Daletownrunner. Norman Nicholson ... a Millom lad, most of his life, but plagued by TB, and often bed ridden. Hence, The Pot Geranium.Quote:
Originally Posted by Daletownrunner
THE POT GERANIUM
By Norman Nicholson
Green slated gables clasp the stem of the hill
In the lemony autumn sun; an acid wind
Dissolves the leaf stalks of back garden trees,
And chimneys with their fires unlit
Seem yet to puff a yellow smoke of poplars.
Freestone is brown as bark, and the model bakery
That once was a Primitive Methodist Chapel
Lifts its cornice against the sky.
And now, like a flight of racing pigeons
Slipped from their basket in the station yard,
A box kite rides the air, a square of calico,
Crimson as the cornets of the Royal Temperance Band
When they brass up the wind in marching. The kite
Strains and struggles on its leash, and unseen boys,
In chicken run or allotment or by the side
Of the old quarry full to the gullet with water,
Pay out on their string a rag of dream,
High as the Jubilee flagpole.
I turn from the window
(Letting the bobbins of autumn wind up the swallows)
And lie on my bed. The ceiling
Slopes over like a tent, and white walls
Wrap themselves round me, leaving only
A flap for the light to blow through. Thighs and spine
Are clamped to the mattress and looping springs
Twine round my chest and hold me. I feel the air
Move on my face like spiders, see the light
Slide across the plaster; but wind and sun
Are mine no longer, nor have I kite to claim them,
Or string to fish the clouds. But there on a shelf
In the warm corner of my dormer window
A pot geranium flies its bright balloon,
Nor can the festering hot-house of the tropics
Breed a tenser crimson; for this crock of soil,
Six inch deep by four across,
Contains the pattern, the prod and pulse of life,
Complete as the Nile or the Niger.
And what need therefore
To stretch for the straining kite? – for kite and flower
Bloom in my room for ever; the light that lifts them
Shines in my own eyes, and my body’s warmth
Hatches their red in my veins. It is the Gulf Stream
That rains down the chimney, making the soot spit; it is the Trade Wind
That blows in the draught under the bedroom door.
My ways are circumscribed, confined as a limpet
To one small radius of rock; yet
I eat the equator, breathe the sky, and carry
The great white sun in the dirt of my finger nails.
More about him here https://www.normannicholson.org/
His stuff is amazing Mossdog, I’m just reading The Whispering Poet, it’s an interesting readQuote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog