monday verse: autumn journal

In honour of National Poetry Day, here is one of my favourite Monday Verse posts from last year.

walking the wheat fields by Phil Marsh

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has
rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow,
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.
So I am glad
That life contains her with her moods and moments
More shifting and more transient than I had
Yet thought of as being integral to beauty;
Whose mind is like the wind on a sea of wheat,
Whose eyes are candour,
And assurance in her…

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monday verse: alcaic

Out in the deep wood, silence and darkness fall, down through the wet leaves comes the October mist; no sound, but only a blackbird scolding, making the mist and darkness listen. Alcaic by Peter Levi A brief return to my Monday Verse posts, with this lovely little autumn poem by Peter Levi. For those who may …

monday verse: out of time

It is a formal and deserted garden With many a flower bed and winding path. A cupid stands and draws a bow at venture Upon a marble bath. All around his feet the eager ivy grows, Stretches upon the stone, above the ground, And in the ivy flowers the busy bee Makes a melodious sound. …

monday verse: elderflower

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk, Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder: It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank And snapping memory as I get older. And elderberry I have learned to call it. I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal, Its berries a swart caviar of shot, …

monday verse: nuts in may

May come up with fiddle bows, May come up with blossom, May come up the same again, The same again but different. from Nuts in May by Louis MacNeice The blossom on our fruit trees this year has been the best since we planted them. We've had flowers for the first time on our pear, …

monday verse: the cherry trees

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding, On the road where all that passed are dead, Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding This early May morn when there is none to wed. The Cherry Trees by Edward Thomas I love it when blossom is blown from trees, and swirls through the …

monday verse: a wood coming into leaf

From the first to the second Warily, from the tip to the palm Third leaf (the blackthorn done) From the fourth to the fifth and (Latrix, Castanea, Fraxinus, Tilja) Thaw taps, groping in stumps, frost like an adder easing away The sixth to the seventh (plums conceive a knobbly stone within a blossom) Ushers the …

weekly photo challenge: half-light (a line-storm song)

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift, The road is forlorn all day, Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift, And the hoof-prints vanish away. The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee, Expend their bloom in vain. Come over the hills and far with me, And be my love in the rain. from A …

monday verse: loveliest of trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. From Loveliest of trees, the cherry now (A Shropshire Lad) by A E Housman

monday verse: six poets Hardy to Larkin

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free – The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me. The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless …