I know your other folk would say the same:
It's such an honour dancing in your frame.
For Fin — iii
She found a certain green to sketch your locks,
A deeper green, a perfect green attaining;
And now another from her crayon-stocks;
Refreshing and repeating what's remaining:
She bleaches it and tries another shade
Then leaves it for a while and grows it out,
Returns it to the colours that she made
Begins to work again, and turns about;
And why this careful labour to provide you
With perfect colours captured in your hair?
She knows your colours mirror what's inside you,
Eternal greens within you everywhere;
And still beneath, the ever-growing you
Shall dye, and yet shall live with life anew.
For Fin — iv
Another green to show you grow, you thrive;
Out from the snow the snowdrop breaks in flower.
Who could have called this sleeping bulb alive?
Yet buried patiently it waits its hour,
Counting the snowflakes slowly settling
Their weight upon the heavy earth above;
One day its Winter changes to its Spring.
Who can predict the power of life and love?
Hope that at last the final frost is dead.
Faith that the Winter dies and Spring shall rise.
Love for the life that up through blades has bled.
Joy to a hundred children's waiting eyes;
For every hour it slept beneath the ground,
A thousand wondering eyes shall gather round.
For Fin — v
A green of richest thought unlimited.
I try to say I love you every day:
I know I keep repeating things I've said.
Perhaps I'll try to phrase another way:
Suppose I counted all the money ever
From now until when Abel risked his neck
With my accountants, who were very clever,
And wrote it on a record-breaking cheque...
It wasn't half your empathising, was it?
Your thoughts are treasured more than bank accounts;
The bank won't put your loving on deposit.
And could they take it, given such amounts?
The jealousy of cash makes misers blind,
And who needs money when you have your mind?
For Fin — vi
A green to match the green of your creation!
She took her time in sketching out your features,
Shading you well, and, drawn with dedication,
You took the pen she gives to all her creatures
And set about some drawing of your own,
Filling the art with arc and line and shade,
Showing your work the care that you were shown,
And making them as well as you were made;
And much as life your drawing hand was giving,
Another life from deep within you drew:
A life, not merely likeness of the living,
So separate, yet such a part of you:
Who finds your baby-picture on the shelf
And smiles and finds you, showing you yourself.
For Fin — vii
A green to go, to boldly forge ahead,
Should shine on traffic lights for every person.
If you should find a colour in its stead
That stops you— not an arrow for diversion,
To Edmundsbury, Hatfield and the North,
Or any other place that's worth the going—
But rather reds that block your going forth;
If traffic signals freeze your days from flowing,
Your life is green and you deserve the green.
And if you try to go about your day
And greens are coming few and far between,
And reds and ambers blare about your way:
If so, I pray your days to hold instead
All green, and never amber, never red.
For Fin — viii
A green for lands of peaceful meditation.
You call: Come stand upon my sacred ground,
Come sit and breathe the peace of contemplation,
Come feel the grass beneath, the lilies round,
Come sleep, come wake, and drink the quiet waters,
Come to the maytree, blackbird, waterfall;
Come know yourselves the planet's sons and daughters.
The people pass and pause, and still you call:
It's waiting for you when you ask to try it:
Peace (and the air) cannot be bought or sold.
You'll never gain it if you try to buy it:
It's not an asset crumpled fists can hold.
All that you have is nothing you can lose;
You stand on sacred ground. Remove your shoes.
For Fin — ix
The Greene King, standing proud with all his queens,
Guarding a land of oaks and aches and cold.
It's not a normal place, by any means,
This island of the oldest of the old,
Where bow the ancient oak and ash and thorn
In homage to a figure on a hill;
Deep in the hills where Wayland Smith was born
You stand, an English body, English still.
For odes and age and air and ale have filled you,
Made you their own and promised you belong;
And since their homesick longing hasn't killed you,
I think you'll be returning to their song;
Come, take your time, and sit and drink with me!
What say you to another cup of tea?
For Fin — x
Jack-in-the-green, surrounded by his trees,
Had given birth to leafy life aplenty,
He'd introduced his firs by fours and threes,
And sowed his seedling cedars by the twenty;
The field was filled with trunks and twigs and roots,
The soil was sound and fertile, and the fall
Would fill the forest floor with growing shoots,
And none but Jack was there to watch it all
Until you came to wander through this field,
To walk within the ways within the wood;
Your mind was brought to peace, your spirit healed,
The forest given form and blessed as good;
Jack-in-the-green will wonder all his days:
your presence never ceases to a maze.
For Fin — xi
A thousand other shades of other greens:
“Leaf”, “emerald”, “sea”, “bottle”, off the cuff;
“Viridian” (uncertain what it means),
But there's so many. Names are not enough.
Yet, in another life, your maker might
Have picked you out among primeval glades
To work as keeper of the rainbow's light
And in another Eden name the shades;
If so, the planet's poets will rejoice
That, given life together with a name,
The colours sing a stronger, clearer voice,
And every hue will never seem the same:
Each of the shades looks loving back to you,
Its namer and the one who made it new.
For Fin — xii
The greenness of the deepness of the seas:
A home to fish of many a scaly nation.
Follow the shoals; the smallest one of these
Swims as a fishy summit of creation.
Yet every one's indebted to the shoal,
All subtle in their difference from the rest:
A fish of friends, a member of the whole,
A mix of traits, a taking of the best.
So you and those of us you love so well
Will grow along with other friends' increase,
Required ingredients in the living-spell:
Each person brings a necessary peace.
The level-headed people mix with mystics,
And both are living mixtures of holistics.
For Fin — xiii
And I, I fall and marvel at the light,
This changing light that grows throughout the years,
Extinguished not by hardship nor by night
Nor foolishness nor sadness nor by tears.
When we were separated by the sea
I wished myself amidst your myriad days.
My wish was mirrored in your missing me;
Your maker joined our wishes, joined our ways;
She placed our hands on one another's heart,
And you and I began a lifelong learning
Of one another, like a magic art
Whose telling grows with every page's turning,
And holds our friendship as a growing bond
Till seventy years old, and still beyond.
For Fin — xiv
A million greens, like fireworks in the night.
I fear this sonnet never can be done.
So many colours burst upon my sight
I cannot tell the tale of every one.
But I can tell how vast excitement fills me
When all the flying sparkles fill the sky;
I want to tell the world how much it thrills me
To hold you close, reflected in your eye;
I want to tell in all my earthly days
And yet beyond, of what you mean to me;
I want to say I love the myriad ways
Of what you are and what you'll grow to be;
These counts combining made the building-blocks
When your creator took her crayon box.
Crossing a bridge in fog
I see for miles, yet all upon my sight
outside my carriage are the endless seas,
the shifting clouds of fog, the tops of trees
that rock a simple path through poisoned white.
And at their feet, some sodden deep in mire?
Some sunk Atlantis sleeping 'neath the weight?
or but a borough innocent of hate,
Not well in hearts, but dead of hope and fire?
A dormitory town? Or have you died?
Though built by stone, your pulse is nearly lost;
though faint your breath, your bridge is still uncrossed:
return before you reach the other side...
O land so drowned in dreams beyond a doubt
dissolve your heartfelt fog, or be spat out.
May
The autumn leaves an ill-defined unease
that (while the summer flourished) I’d ignored.
The litany begins. We can’t afford
the oil we need to buy before the freeze;
they’ve forecast snow: we need to fix the tiles
that blew away before the summer came,
fit plastic shrouds on every window-frame;
there isn’t any salt in stock for miles.
Yet soon I’ll wake, and March will fall behind,
and though the winter’s dark was death, it’s done,
as every tree salutes the sudden sun
with leaves that bring the healing of my mind:
a spring to clean away the winter’s dust.
My will returns. May will return. It must.
* * *
First published in 14 by 14, July 2010.
If Lady Gaga wrote sonnets
How do I love thee? In a way that's bad,
by which I mean so bad it's almost good.
I need you, and you know it drives me mad.
I want you more than any other could.
And we could write romances, you and me.
I want to hear your Hitchcock movie schtick.
I want your everything. I hope it's free.
I want you in my window, and you're sick.
And yet you know my raving is a sign
I'd rather we were paramours than friends.
You're outlawed from the moment that you're mine
Until the day our bad romancing ends;
I'll love you in a leather-studded bra.
Rah gaga gaga roma ooh la la.
Sans everything
Remember all the old familiar faces?
Helvetica's the nicest of the lot.
Gill Sans and Johnston take the second places;
It seems as though the serif has been shot.
Verdana has its own intrinsic glories;
The fairest text that ever left my desk
Was set in these— for essays or for stories.
But using them for sonnets? That's grotesque.
And gravestones are a special case as well:
A mortal lack of serif fonts would be
A certain kind of typographic hell
With Comic Sans for all eternity.
In death, the Roman lettering is best.
May flights of serifs sing thee to thy rest.
We had it tough
We had no sonnets when I was a lad.
Well, none of us could run to fourteen lines.
We stuck to ballad form. And we were glad!
As if we gave a damn for such designs!
(Though when I went to college, I heard tell
about some PhD extravaganza
researching something called a villanelle,
and even they were short the final stanza.)
My tutor, Dr Rhymer, used to say
“The ballad's coming back; we must allow
the quatorzain to have its little day.”
Still, catch me writing sonnets, even now;
Perhaps I'll fill a ballad with my scorn.
You modern poets hardly know you're born.
For Alex
Within this world, there waits a patient wood
that longs for recreation by your touch
to fall, be sold, be sawn, and seen as good.
Its oaks have pinned their hopes to suffer such;
its maples dream as much as they are able,
and every aspen whispers to itself:
they pine for you to bring them to the table,
or give them self-assurance as a shelf.
Then there's yourself. The elements essential
within the raw material of you
are scintillating stock, with star potential;
still, steadily you work, and make them new.
And beauty's born, no matter where it lies,
for all the world reflects behind your eyes.
Requiem for an oak
I thought I saw an execution there.
The fascinated public gathered round.
The cheerful hangmen stripped the victim bare
And built their gibbet high above the ground.
The rope was taut, my wildness filled with fear.
I saw him fall. I heard his final cry.
Yet when the hangmen left I ventured near
To find my fault: I'd never seen him die.
In fact, I think he'd died some years ago.
There's blackness of decay in every breath.
The sound of flies was all that's left to grow,
Now free to come and feast upon his death;
Prince of the trees, I have a simple plea:
I will not die till death has come to me.
For night can only hide, and not destroy
When once I stop and take account of these
that God has granted me upon the earth,
the loves, the friends, the work, that charm and please
these things I count inestimable worth;
when once I stop, I learn that I am rich
beyond the dreams of emperors and kings
and light is real, and real these riches which
exceed the worth of all material things...
when thus I stop, I cannot understand
when few and fe
eble sunbeams cannot find
their way into that drab and dreary land,
the darkness of the middle of my mind.
yet darkness cannot take away my joy,
for night can only hide, and not destroy.
I always tried to write about the light
I always tried to write about the light
that inks these eyes in instant tint and hue,
that chances glances, sparkles through the night,
fresh as the morning, bloody as the dew;
the light that leaves your image in my mind,
that shining silver, shared for everyone,
that banishes the darkness from the blind,
the circle of the surface of the sun.
And when your light is shining far from mine,
when scores of stars are standing at their stations,
we'll weave our fingers round them as they shine,
and write each other's name on constellations;
and so we'll stand, and still, however far,
lock eyes and wish upon a single star.
Here from the hilltop down towards the dell
Here from the hilltop down towards the dell
I'll wander till this evening, I don't care.
An afternoon all fertile with the spell
Still calling me: be still and drink the air.
And so I'll pause, and ponder as I hike,
I'll take my time before the valley floor,
And meditate, and maybe, if I like,
Climb back again and walk the path once more.
Full twenty years I've walked this hillside trail,
And every time it makes itself anew;
Unveiling as I head towards the vale,
A flower unseen, an unexpected view...
Again I lose my footing with a scream,
Fall forty feet, and drown beneath the stream.
Sleep
They say my future follows on your past,
Commanded not to love you by the wise:
They say he never truly lives who lies
A captive still, and by your charms held fast:
Your warmth was torn by chilly morning air,
through daytime heat your image in my eye
would ever grow, would wane, would never die,
and with the night, you'd once again be there.
You took my life, and took away my breath;
You took my world, and left your words untrue.
No dreams are left I haven't left with you,
And still you keep reminding me of death.
I've abdicated kingdoms for your sake:
And yet, and yet...I wish myself awake.
Transfiguration
What's seen is seen, and cannot be unknown;
and so he turned my soul, and turns it still.
We'd walked a while, just him and us alone;
we'd wandered up some ordinary hill.
The air was cold. The conversation died.
I wondered if I'd left the stove alight.
The curtains of the world were torn aside,
and naked glory overwhelmed my sight;
and oh, the voice, that called to him by name,
so comforting, so terrible to hear:
that man I knew, the same, yet not the same,
touches my arm, and tells me not to fear;
but as I raise my eyes, the light is gone,
and life, and something more, must carry on.
* * *
Written as part of a Lenten meditation series at Christ Church, Pottstown.
Robert Dennis Thurman
This day we lay the universe to rest:
behind this pair of eyes that lived and died