narya_flame

I remembered on Thursday that I missed doing this last week - and this week's is just a short one, but feels apt.

Thaw

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from the elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass,
What we below could not see: Winter pass.

(More about the author here.)

Something hopeful and create-y this week.

Reply to the Question "How Can You Become a Poet?"

take the leaf of a tree

trace its exact shape

the outside edges

and inner lines

memorize the way it is fastened to the twig

(and how the twig arches from the branch)

how it springs forth in April

how it is panoplied in July

by late August

crumple it in your hand

so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew its woody stem

listen to its autumn rattle

watch as it atomizes in the November air

then in winter

when there is no leaf left

invent one

The Owl

I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table. Common mallards
Were artefacts of some unearthliness,
Their wooings were a hypnagogic film
Unreeled by the river. Impossible
To comprehend the comfort of their feet
In the freezing water. You were a camera
Recording reflections you could not fathom.
I made my world perform its utmost for you.
You took it all in with an incredulous joy
Like a mother handed her new baby
By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy,
It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood
Of fifteen years before. My masterpiece
Came that black night on the Grantchester Road.
I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit
Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse
Where a tawny owl was enquiring.
Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions
Into my face, taking me for a post.

(Taken from Birthday Letters, originally published by Faber in 1998.)

A day late this week because of real life stuff, but I wanted to do it anyway. Chat welcome in the comments.

The Way through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools

Where the otter whistles his mate,

(They fear not men in the woods,

Because they see so few.)

You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods ...

But there is no road through the woods.

(I won't bother linking to an online bio of Rudyard Kipling; there are plenty out there. I recently came across this poem collected here, but just the first stanza. I remembered studying it at school; I hadn't thought about it for about fifteen years, but I immediately knew something was missing, and went looking for the poem in its entirety.)

Current Mood: calm

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Entries tagged with nature

My Poem of the Week: 'Thaw' by Edward Thomas

My Poem of the Week: 'Reply to the Question "How Can You Become a Poet?"' by Eve Merriam

My Poem of the Week: 'The Owl' by Ted Hughes

My Poem of the Week: 'The Way through the Woods' by Rudyard Kipling

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