Today's poet

[Alf]

Looking forward !!!! Predictive text !!!!

That's the trouble with that Predictive Text freckle its too unpredictable

[Alf]

Alone

I’ve listened: and all the sounds I heard
Were music,—wind, and stream, and bird.
With youth who sang from hill to hill
I’ve listened: my heart is hungry still.

I’ve looked: the morning world was green;
Bright roofs and towers of town I’ve seen;
And stars, wheeling through wingless night.
I’ve looked: and my soul yet longs for light.

I’ve thought: but in my sense survives
Only the impulse of those lives
That were my making. Hear me say
‘I’ve thought!’—and darkness hides my day.

Siegfried Sassoon

Excellent choice that Mossy

[Mossdog]

Falling Leaves and Early Snow


In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.

In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

KENNETH REXROTH

[freckle]

Falling Leaves and Early Snow


In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.

In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

KENNETH REXROTH

At last I am in front of a functioning computer which allows me to comment on this thread!

Mossy I adore this poem. Having got back from a lovely frosty run it describes many of the things i saw today including the "glittering leaves of cottonwood" which i think is a gem of a line. I am really enjoying the colourscape of autumn this year and there is something quite ethereal about frosty november mornings which is captured in this verse. I don't know what the reference to 1939 is about...the advent of WW2? ...will ponder

[freckle]

Simon Armitage is at the SAGE Gateshead tonight where a new drama he has written will be performed live as part of radio 3's Free Thinking Festival and its free...

http://thesagegateshead.org/news-and...land-and-un-h/

Unfortunately I can't make it. Here is a poem of his which I like....

Homecoming

Think, two things on their own and both at once.
The first, that exercise in trust, where those in front
stand with their arms spread wide and free-fall
backwards, blind, and those behind take all the weight.


The second, one canary-yellow cotton jacket
on a cloakroom floor, uncoupled from its hook,
becoming scuffed and blackened underfoot. Back home
the very model of a model of a mother, yours,puts
two and two together, makes a proper fist of it
and points the finger. Temper, temper. Questions
in the house. You seeing red. Blue murder. Bed.


Then midnight when you slip the latch and sneak
no further than the phone box at the corner of the street;
I'm waiting by the phone, although it doesn't ring
because it's sixteen years or so before we'll meet.
Retrace that walk towards the garden gate;in silhouette
a father figure waits there, wants to set things straight.


These ribs are pleats or seams. These arms are sleeves.
These fingertips are buttons, or these hands can fold
into a clasp, or else these fingers make a zip
or buckle, you say which. Step backwards into it
and try the same canary-yellow cotton jacket,there
like this, for size again. It still fits.



------------


When I first red this I thought elements of it was quite sinister and dark...then I thought that actually what it might be talking about is a family row which is resolved in reconciliation and a hug and that what is saying is that families can withstand conflict?

[Mossdog]

Great to see you're back Freckle. Hope all is well. Enjoyed the SA post.

Nox Borealis

If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly,
if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion,
if the wind can learn to read our minds
and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket,
surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.

Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming
unimaginable dreams in hollow trees,
even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us
with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.

Listen to me now: think of something you love
but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us
only what we can afford to lose.

Campbell McGrath

[Hes]

Wow, that sounds amazing Mossy. It must have felt incredible, so primal and such a rare privilege to be among them. You are right, it is moments like that that stay with you forever.

Oh yes! More please.

That reminds me...Last winter, while running off Loadpot Hill above Ullswater, along the long grassy ridge, on the way back to Askham, I had the eastern Lake fells to myself, or so it seemed. Until, from over the ridge to my left, a herd of a dozen red deer or so (part of the Dalemain Herd I found out later), came charging up and over, presumedly spooked by something or other down by the lakeside, into a state of hysteria. For that briefest of moments, I found myself enveloped and running amongst these magnificent animals, before they disappeared off to my right, Carhullan way. Such rare moments in life as simply priceless and one of the many precious treasures of 'wild' fell running.

[Alf]

At last I am in front of a functioning computer which allows me to comment on this thread!

Mossy I adore this poem. Having got back from a lovely frosty run it describes many of the things i saw today including the "glittering leaves of cottonwood" which i think is a gem of a line. I am really enjoying the colourscape of autumn this year and there is something quite ethereal about frosty november mornings which is captured in this verse. I don't know what the reference to 1939 is about...the advent of WW2? ...will ponder

freckle has entered the building :thumbup:


November Night

Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Adelaide Crapsey

[Alf]

One of the reasons I run on the fells I suppose.


Glad of these times


Driving along the motorway
swerving the packed lanes
I am glad of these times.

Because I did not die in childbirth
because my children will survive me
I am glad of these times.

I am not hungry, I do not curtsey,
I lock my door with my own key
and I am glad of these times,

glad of central heating and cable TV
glad of email and keyhole surgery
glad of power showers and washing machines,

glad of polio inoculations
glad of three weeks' paid holiday
glad of smart cards and cash-back,

glad of twenty types of yoghurt
glad of cheap flights to Prague
glad that I work.

I do not breathe pure air or walk green lanes,
see darkness, hear silence,
make music, tell stories,

tend the dead in their dying
tend the new-born in their birthing,
tend the fire in its breathing,

but I am glad of my times,
these times, the age
we feel in our bones, our rage

of tyre music, speed
annulling the peasant graves
of all my ancestors,

glad of my hands on the wheel
and the cloud of grit as it rises
where JCBs move motherly
widening the packed motorway.

Helen Dunmore

[Mossdog]

November Night

Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Adelaide Crapsey

Like it. Straight to the point, haiku-like, and captures the season exactly.

Here's one I read the other night and enjoyed.


[Sleeping sister of a farther sky]

Sleeping sister of a farther sky,
dropped from zenith like a tender tone,
the lucid apex of a scale unknown
whose whitest whisper is an opaque cry

of measureless frequency, the spectral sigh
you breath, bright hydrogen and brighter zone
of fissured carbon, consummated moan
and ceaseless rapture of a brilliant why.

Will nothing wake you from your livid rest?
Essence of ether and astral stone
the stunned polarities your substance weaves

in one bright making, like a dream of leaves
in the tree’s mind, summered. Or as a brooding bone
roots constellations in the body’s nest.

KAREN VOLKMAN