SHARING POEMS
Musings in Solitude
I love how poems lead us deeper into the fabric and experience of our lives, interweaving within the subtleness of life's enchantments and helping us to see things differently, or anew. I love how words curl up in our thoughts to settle somewhere safe, and we return to them, in quiet moments, always finding something fresh or different in how we feel as we re-read them. Here are a few poems that I so enjoy...​
All Nature has a Feeling
by JOHN CLARE
All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.
Vanished Days: A Musical Memorial Tribute to John O'Donohue
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
The Zebras
by ROY CAMPBELL
From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
Wading knee-keep among the scarlet flowers.
The sunlight, zithering their flanks with fire,
Flashes between the shadows as they pass
Barred with electric tremors through the grass
Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre.
Into the flushed air snorting rosy plumes
That smoulder round their feet in drifting fumes,
With dove-like voices call the distant fillies,
While round the herds the stallion wheels his flight,
Engine of beauty volted with delight,
To roll his mare among the trampled lilies.
On the Fifth Day
by JANE HIRSHFIELD
On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.
The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.
Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,
while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.
The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking
of rivers, of boulders and air.
Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.
Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.
They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.
Fern Hill
(first two stanzas)
by DYLAN THOMAS
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
The Peace of Wild Things
by WENDELL BERRY
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The Song of Wandering Aengus
BY WB YEATS - READ BY MICHAEL GAMBON
This is such a beautiful poem and such a poignant reading; it is truly one of my favourites. I will be forever thankful to great actors who touch our hearts through their readings so that our lives are deeper, more textured, and filled with beauty and meaning.
'The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.'
Sunday 29 October 2023
Seamus Heaney - A Life in Letters
Yesterday, I attended this wonderfully inspiring event at the Southbank Centre in London. It felt quite magical being there... and worlds apart from my quiet life in Cape Town.
...then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Dart
(excerpt)
by ALICE OSWALD
I never pass that place and not make time
to see if there’s an eel come up the stream
I let time go as slow as moss, I stand
and try to get the dragonflies to land
their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand
The Summer Day
by MARY OLIVER
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The American Poets
Thursday 5 October 2021
Last night I hopped on a bus from where I was staying at our cousin’s home in Belsize Park, and I travelled to the British Library, where for a few hours I experienced the most enjoyable evening listening to The Poetry Hour's 'The American Poets'.
The Heart of the Woods
BY AUGUSTA, LADY GREGORY - READ BY DOIREANN NI GHRIOFA
​
After reading Lady Gregory - An Irish Life, I became enchanted by what I read of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and then, after reading Peter Brook's thought-provoking The Open Door - Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, I became enamoured by thoughts of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, and although both touched my romantic sensibilities, sadly, I have never had the chance to visit either. I did, however, find this wonderful poem that spoke to me about so much that I treasure and hold dear in my life.
