Today's poet

[Hes]

Thanks Freckle, night, sleep tight.xx

gorgeous Hes!!!!!!

night all x

[Alf]

Barn Owl

heart faced and silent
fluttering above its prey
the ghost hunter waits

Excellent Haiku Hes

[Alf]

Like that, makes me glad i'm not a vole

Aye there's not many V40 voles about Steve

[Alf]

Indeed a lovely choice Alf, I have really enjoyed all of the Spring inspired verse...

and now for something completely different...I have been looking up the poems of Anne Sexton, a contemporary of Slyvia Plath I believe and one who suffered the same sad fate...i really liked this poem which I thought gave a powerful insight into what it might be like to be in a psychiatric ward in the 1960s...ish

Anne Sexton - Lullaby

It is a summer evening.
The yellow moths sag
against the locked screens
and the faded curtains
suck over the window sills
and from another building
a goat calls in his dreams.

This is the TV parlor
in the best ward at Bedlam.
The night nurse is passing
out the evening pills.
She walks on two erasers,
padding by us one by one.
MY sleeping pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it floats me out of myself,
my stung skin as alien
as a loose bolt of cloth.

I will ignore the bed.
I am linen on a shelf.
Let the others moan in secret;
let each lost butterfly go home.
Old woolen head,
take me like a yellow moth
while the goat calls hush-a-bye.

Lush that choice freckle. That first verse really sucks you in to the poem

[Alf]

I deserted the fells for a run on country lanes on Saturday and enjoyed the Blackthorn blossom emerging along the road side. The buds were breaking on the Silver Birches in my garden and it seemed as though the recent showers of rain had reminded them all that it was spring.

The Blackthorn

The blackthorn was his father's,
a piece of Ireland
that the old man could still get his hands around
even as his hands grew weak,
refused to hold. My father
never knew Ireland;
when he gripped the walking stick
it was something else he was holding on to.
I watched my father
get old; he would stare at his hand
and open and close his fist,
try to fight the arthritis.
By then he had lost the stick,
and he could have used it
to work his grip, to beat
at the hard knot that was tying him up.
When he died he was laid in the ground
only a few feet from his father,
while in Ireland the sturdy blackthorns
were defying that sad land
and bursting with white blossoms.

Louis McKee

[Harry H Howgill]

This is one of my absolute favourites Hes. It is just perfect.

I liked the Barn Owl haiku too.

Happy the Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

John Dryden

[Mossdog]

Late Fragment
Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life,even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

There's a strength in it's brevity. Thanks F. I missed some treats on this thread last night it seems.

[Mossdog]

Barn Owl

heart faced and silent
fluttering above its prey
the ghost hunter waits

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... well caught Hes.

[Mossdog]

Indeed a lovely choice Alf, I have really enjoyed all of the Spring inspired verse...

and now for something completely different...I have been looking up the poems of Anne Sexton, a contemporary of Slyvia Plath I believe and one who suffered the same sad fate...i really liked this poem which I thought gave a powerful insight into what it might be like to be in a psychiatric ward in the 1960s...ish

Anne Sexton - Lullaby

It is a summer evening.
The yellow moths sag
against the locked screens
and the faded curtains
suck over the window sills
and from another building
a goat calls in his dreams.

This is the TV parlor
in the best ward at Bedlam.
The night nurse is passing
out the evening pills.
She walks on two erasers,
padding by us one by one.
MY sleeping pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it floats me out of myself,
my stung skin as alien
as a loose bolt of cloth.

I will ignore the bed.
I am linen on a shelf.
Let the others moan in secret;
let each lost butterfly go home.
Old woolen head,
take me like a yellow moth
while the goat calls hush-a-bye.

Soporifically disturbing somehow. And you're right, it contains echos of 'our' Sylvia

[Mossdog]

I deserted the fells for a run on country lanes on Saturday and enjoyed the Blackthorn blossom emerging along the road side. The buds were breaking on the Silver Birches in my garden and it seemed as though the recent showers of rain had reminded them all that it was spring.

The Blackthorn

The blackthorn was his father's,
a piece of Ireland
that the old man could still get his hands around
even as his hands grew weak,
refused to hold. My father
never knew Ireland;
when he gripped the walking stick
it was something else he was holding on to.
I watched my father
get old; he would stare at his hand
and open and close his fist,
try to fight the arthritis.
By then he had lost the stick,
and he could have used it
to work his grip, to beat
at the hard knot that was tying him up.
When he died he was laid in the ground
only a few feet from his father,
while in Ireland the sturdy blackthorns
were defying that sad land
and bursting with white blossoms.

Louis McKee

Great choice Alf. And have you seen the blackthorn this year? Magnificent, almost otherworldly in the way the starch-white blossoms contrast with the matt black branches below, with both, incongruous against the fresh sprouting green world that envelops them.