Poems of loss and hope by Anne Smith (reading an ebook .txt) 📕

out their little span
Contentedly. What do they know?
But if I don’t toil,
If I don’t have a doing day,
I’ll have nothing to wear,
I’ll have nothing to eat,
I’ll have nowhere to live.
And it’ll be my fault.
While I think of all this
My doing day grinds to a halt.
Now it’s a thinking day.
Lilies and sky
Don’t have those either.
 
Winter: Mourning

In the January grey today was a grieving day.
It was not raining but chill; I remembered you ill
And dying, and I trying again and again
To help with the pain
Till we couldn’t pretend it wasn’t the end.
But though it was, it wasn’t quite, for
I can almost hear
Your step on the stair
But you’re never there and it doesn’t seem fair.
So today was a grieving day for us and for me.


Jetsam

Above the high tideline
Stranded, I lie
Far away from
The countless murmurings
Of grains of sand
Brushing against each other.

In my ears
Only the ebb and flow of life
Reverberates at a distance.
One day, in a spring tide
I will be washed back to sea.
But not yet.

 Waking Alone

Sometimes I carry you round in my heart
Tenderly
And the day is flooded with gold light
And love.
Sometimes I drag your memory behind me
Reluctantly
And the day is dark with the burden of it.

No one can see
The effort this darkness costs me
Only the others with burdens like mine
Can understand.
Sometimes on television
I see shows about families,
With all their various anxieties
And traumas
And I think

Just you wait
Till the family leaves home, the husband is dead
And you’re on your own.
The family dramas and all that stress
Will seem nostalgically better
Than this silence.

 Winter Garden

Most of the flowers have gone.
Some, misguided, hang on;
Heaven knows why. You’d think
They’d welcome the chance to drowse
Deep in the womb of the earth
Till spring woke them up again.
But most of the flowers have gone.

It’s the season of the berry:
Holly and laurel and ivy,
Orange, white, yellow and red,
The rosehips sweet on the rose
And mahonia ready to turn
From yellow to low-drooping blue.
It’s the season of the berry.

Most of the leaves have gone
From those trees that lose them each year.
Those that remain are golden and brown.
But the evergreens still hold their colour,
And camellias come into bud
Against waxy dark-green-shining leaves –
Many of the leaves have gone.

But the garden’s not empty below
The skeleton trees above.
Papyrus, bamboo and the peony tree
Flourish beneath them in pots;
New Zealand flax waves its tall leaves,
Christmas hellebore’s waiting to flower:
No; the garden’s not empty at all.

 


Journey Home

Outside this train the countryside is quiet
Green under grey sky, with patches of colour,
Stubble’s ochre and yellow of late sunflowers.
Houses nestle into the side of hills,
Their stone walls and terracotta roofs blending
With the background of field and grove.

Like a furtive dragon the train slinks by
Not wanting a fight today.
We pass a farmhouse and its domain
Of barns and outhouses, dignified
With serving the land around it.
Small churches with sturdy towers make a focus
For the cottages huddling round them.

Now our train, the interloper, approaches
A large town of this departement:
Here are houses and flats, busy people
Who move on and off the platforms,
And a freight train bringing cars from Spain.
Houses cling to a bluff above us as we slowly
Draw away.

Suddenly in our carriage swearing in French and English –
‘Merde’ he says, and ‘Oh shit!’
Which is at least consistent.
Someone has left his papers on the platform.
His wife has little sympathy – ‘You talk too much’ she says
‘And don’t pay attention to things’.
We have no sympathy either for they also talk
Too loudly. I pretend not to be English
Until they settle down.

On the outskirts of a town a new estate
Waits for its weathering
The houses do not yet fit in
Though traditional in style.
They are too pink and altogether young.
Travelling north, we cross and recross
The great dark slow-moving river
Which punctuate our progress,
And now we pass avenues of straight poplars
Like mediaeval illustrations,
And thicker trees infested with mistletoe
Which conjure druids and pages of Asterix.

The sun shines fitfully against black clouds;
From time to time it rains;
We’re slipping gently towards twilight, and
Moving from the great emptiness of the south
To cities in the north so much more like
What we are used to.
And now we wait for this quiet dragon to slide
Into the terminus, into its lair.
And when it does we leave for another cave
From which a sea monster will carry us
Under the sea until we’re home again.


 

Storm in the Dordogne

It was becoming hotter all that day;
The sun burned down, the sky was cloudless, blue,
And on the terrasse where we spent our time
The terracotta pots ablaze with flowers.
Bees buzzed around, a butterfly appeared,
A baby lizard ran from shade to shade
Lifting its tiny fingers one by one
Protecting each in turn against the heat.
Swallows above us swooped and looped the loop,
And we were drowsy, lazy and content.
Later we went for pizza down the hill
Taking the car in case the rain should come –
And we were right, for just as we drove back
The first large spots of rain began to fall.
Our window gave a panoramic view
Across the river valley to the woods
Which clothed the hillside on the other bank.
And as we looked sheet lightning backlit them
Forked lightning too, and then the thunder came.
After the thunder rain began again
And fell in stair rods on the arid earth
And fell in sheets and tumbled down the hill
Missing the gutters, sweeping all ahead.
All night the thunder rolled and lightning flashed,
The rain beat down on road and house alike.
And then the morning came: the world as damp
And clean as I am freshly from the shower,
The sky a pale washed blue, the plants and trees
Shining with water droplets on their leaves.
Cooler this morning than the night before,
We saw a new and less familiar world.

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Publication Date: 12-01-2009

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