The singing of a blackbird stops me dead in my tracks. Enraptured by his music I stand wallowing in beauty.
The cloak of evening softly creeps over the land. His music continues and still I stand.
“Are you OK?” a voice, as from another world asks.
“Yes” I reply.
The magic broken I go on my way.
He, later to family perhaps,
“I saw a strange man today. He stood, head cocked, listening to I know not what”.
I see you, bare feet leaving traces in the damp sand.
Lost in beauty, you watch the gulls as they wheel and cry.
The salt sea caresses your sun kissed skin.
The birds continue to scream overhead.
The sceen overpowers, your tears mingle and are lost in the great atlantic.
In my dreams I glimpse you, a girl walking along the beach.
Until yesterday I was unfamiliar with the work of Pablo Nerud. His poem, Tonight I can Write The Saddest Lines is beautiful and poignant. My only criticism (of the reading, not the poem) is the music which accompanies it, which, to my mind acts as a distraction to the reader.
For the reading please go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2zR7brOA3E
Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush is one of my favourite poems. I recollect having had similar thoughts to those described by Hardy while pausing to listen to the song of a bird. In my case it was, I think a blackbird rather than a thrush which produced the emotions so aptly described by the poet in the below poem.
“I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.”
Here in London’s Crystal Palace autumn lingers. The perfume from fallen leaves scents the air. How strange that people spend vast amounts on expensive scents when nature produces perfumes more fragrant than anything man is capable of producing.
Autumn is melancholy and beauty inextricably interwoven. The gorgeous smells emanating from the newly fallen leaves make me feel good to be alive. Yet it is, at the same time the dying of the year, the interlude between life giving summer with it’s blooming roses and winter which will, inevitably clasp us to her icey bosom. Yet life continues far beneath winter’s frosty grip and, come the spring we will be delighted by birds building their nests, roses budding and the sound of lawn mowers as the powerful aroma of newly mown grass scents the air. The great cycle, turn and turn again. We are part of something beautiful and a little mysterious.
Autumn
Suzanne Vega is one of my favourite artists (to the best of my knowledge I own all of her albums). St Clare is hauntingly beautiful and brings tears to my eyes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvekoHGK8i0
You come to me your golden gown floating in the breeze. For a while we dally in the woods rich with the scent of the dying year. Beautiful in your approaching death, golden tresses fall, our mouths meet hungrily for soon you must go. A new stern mistress will I have dressed in snow and ice.
The sun has chased the rain away here in Crystal Palace although he is no doubt waiting in the wings for an opportunity to pounce again.
Autumn has come early. The ground is strewn with leaves and the air is perfumed with the scent of rich earth. Damp ground and newly fallen leaves mingle to delight the senses.
I love autumn. A gentle sun combined with the sound of leaves crunching underfoot, who could ask for more? Autumn reminds me of the cyclical nature of time. The growth of spring and summer is superceeded by the slow retreat into death of autumn which culminates in winter. The dying of the year is exquisetly beautiful, melancholy intimately mingled with profound beauty, perhaps symbolic of life itself.
Oh that I might, in the softness of night, steal a kiss from your lips. Oh that my hands might go awandering in your unexplored land. Your mysteries remain hidden, forever forbidden to those such as I, who yearn to walk at your side. Oh to lie in your arms and forget life’s harms. Beauty or duty?I do forget myself.
K Morris - Poet 