Get used to it
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I've put a short poem and its music on the 'Music to other Poems' page.
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I've put a short poem and its music on the 'Music to other Poems' page.
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I'm very lucky that John Holmes has found the time to read three poems from The Old Human here.
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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.
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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.