Winter Heath

When better days have ridden

Their ribbons of mist under the dawn

Receding to the hollows

And hidden places they came from

We only lose ourselves in searching

For time’s wealth backward wound

But palliate in smaller comforts

That on snow-swept heaths are found

 

Garden, veranda in summer

Do not ask what came of

The clothes we wore back then

Or why the gardens were cut short

By new paths

Do not ask for a remembering

Of those wine-sweet nights, or

The poems composed on the veranda

Between sighs

Preparedness

The driftwood makes nests for daggers

Because this is unexpected

Coming from the sea

The long shadows become like friends

Well-anticipated, and as liable

To embrace, or to strike

As to slip away

 

Second-day moon

I am not waiting, no

The red thrush fathoms not our measures

Of days and stars, neither does

The boulder turn from falling

Off the precipice

I am no longer on the mountain

Nor in the plains below

 

 

The Charmer by Evenlight

A soldier hurrying to his King

Had his horse fall lame

And seeking help he was told

The charmer might give him aid

So he went into a dell of ferns

Where lay the charmer’s house

Knocked, and there he waited

Until an aged woman came out

He touched his badge in salute

And offered generous pay

But she said she could do nothing

And began to turn away

“You cannot, or will not?”

The soldier did then demand

“My King can surely pay your price”

Yet the woman shook her head

Underside man

He ate my nightmare and I woke

To his reaching for my last years

In raging torrents and parched channels

Roots and roofs mired in tears

I would have lived the dreaming through

With all its miseries

Rather than see his hands dispersing

Earth into hollow galaxies

And I had given him nothing

I had not crowned him underside

An arbiter of fates with appetite

To eat fruits of mouth and mind

But he had his crown of the people

All neighbours but strangers to me

And I was helpless but to yield him

My future wrapped in my dreams

*

Image from earth.com

Going

Lift the heavens’ paper screens

When I turn my head

And let the bands of day presage

Roads running blue to red