Category Archives: poetry

Spring ups and downs.

poetry, , , ,
fig

DAYS

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

– Philip Larkin

One of my favorites will do for a spring poem. I don’t have much to say about my garden pictures, so I looked through old posts for verse to accompany them, and it appears that springtime has generally found me too busy to read poetry. It’s happening again.

The last day of November I was soddenly planting out bulbs and annuals in the front yard and wishing things were different; I had not wanted to be planting myself; that’s why I’d hired the new landscaper, to help me. It also seemed too late to be setting out those plants. Well, now I am awfully glad for everything, and the flowers that are proliferating at this point.

In the back, more surprises. For one, I didn’t think the irises I transplanted last fall would bloom yet, but they have lots of buds. And a disappointing surprise is that the daffodils from the package I bought are not as advertised:

One of my already blooming  new perennials is this member of the gooseberry family:

Ribes viburnifolium – Santa Catalina Island Currant

At the moment a cold wind is banging the gate and rain is coming on. I’m wishing I hadn’t arranged for help to clean the fountain today, and glad I took these pictures yesterday and before. By the time the storm passes more things will be blooming, and a new day will come and wake us — a day to be happy in.
Continue reading Spring ups and downs. →

You stay home too.

home, nature, poetry

STAY HOME

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

-Wendell Berry

Mr and Mrs Glad in the Warner Mountains

We are all kindled.

feasts, poetry, , ,

ANNUNCIATION

Deep within the clay, and O my people
very deep within the wholly earthen
compound of our kind arrives of one clear,
star-illumined evening a spark igniting
once again the tinder of our lately
banked noetic fire. She burns but she
is not consumed. The dew lights gently,
suffusing the pure fleece. The wall comes down.
And—do you feel the pulse?—we all become
the kindled kindred of a King whose birth
thereafter bears to all a bright nativity.

-Scott Cairns

A prayer utters itself.

poetry, prayer

PRAYER

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –-
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

-Carol Ann Duffy

Eugene Jansson, Dusk