» Listings for October 2020

1. Cycling

   Posted on 12:30pm Tuesday 27th Oct 2020

    

   Here's a sonnet! To my two youngest, who visited a few weeks ago. There's a reading with music on the Music page. Thank you boys!

   Cycling

   Now you are yourselves and strong in all you do,

   This bright window moment and you alike,

   As riding off down the storied road you go,

   Graceful, precious, receding on your bikes.

   I cannot look at you but think of all the years

   Of your growing, your earth-dark and wheat-light days,

   But see those fertile fields and wish them near

   Always; only to let them turn away.

   In time, you too may be divided

   Into two, three, four or more, into boy and girl:

   All you are, dispersed, effortlessly sown,

   Baffling and indefinable, unguided,

   As you spread your balm upon this aching world,

   Yielding me restful, lucky at what I’ve known.

    

    

2. October

   Posted on 10:30am Wednesday 21st Oct 2020

   I wrote a poem about October, featuring hollyhocks, vines and starlings. I'm not sure the last verse isn't rather obscure. It's just that when I was young, starlings were common (I think they're making a comeback in places now), and before I spent a life in science, defining natural kinds in terms of their behaviour and objective characters, birds could mean so many things!

   

    

   October

    

   Zounds! The hollyhock’s drunk again,

   Sways from a footless fulcrum,

   Lurches but cannot fall;

   And the grapevine shoots

   Thrash sclerotic leaves,

   First resentful, then cross,

   As they hunt like tethered wasps.

   All is awash with wind

   As the garden dims

   And the year disappears

   Into October.

    

   Straight down comes the rain, briefly abates,

   Swirls, ceases in a net,

   Then blows across in pillows

   Which burst as they beat up

   Some teeming ahead;

   A family of fallings

   Receives a roof-full of applause.

   And the trees are chattering

   As the long hours scatter

   Into memory

   Behind October.

    

   Birds fragment in an upward shower;

   I thought they were starlings,

   But that was long ago,

   When the sky opened

   Blind and assured.

   Now there is only behaviour;

   Birds observed, finally set free

   Of me and you,

   Of everything untrue,

   Wonderful;

   Free of October.