Song at Drumholm

My liveliest self, I give you fair leave
in these windblown weathers,
heather-hearted and human and strange,
to turn every blackberry corner
of yesterday's summer.

The robin, singing her love-me-forever,
kiss-catch-clutch-in the heather
blues, sings tide flow
and autumn's turning and white
winds folding.

Cattle along all hedges wind winter
into their frosty
breathing, their slow eyes dreaming
barn, bullock, and fodder
under all hedges.

But sea cave and sycamore tell us the world
is wider than weather.
Blackberries darken the corners
I turn, and gold seas turning
darken, darken.

My liveliest self, my other, Godspeed
on our farings,
The bronze path at evening.           Toward summer,
then,                    My hand, your hand -
as if first meeting.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by John Unterecker, 1977

Witness

An ordinary evening in Wisconsin
seen from a Greyhound bus - mute aisles
of merchandise the sole inhabitants
of the half-darkened Five and Ten,

the tables of the single lit cafe awash
with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane
of the inadvertently transparent instant
when no one is looking: outside town

the barns, their red gone dark with sundown,
withhold the shudder of a warped terrain -
the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines
already submarine with nightfall, flocks

(like dark sheep) of toehold junipers,
the lucent arms of birches: purity
without a mirror, other than a mind bound
elsewhere, to tell it how it looks.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Amy Clampitt, 1985

After a Month of Rain

Everything I thought I wanted
is right here,
particularly when the sun
is making such a comeback,

and the lilac engorged
with purple has recovered
from its severe pruning,
and you will be back soon

to dispel whatever it is
that overtakes me like leaf blight,
even on a day like this. I can still
hear remnants of the rain

in the swollen stream
behind the house, in the faint
dripping under the eaves,
persistent as memory.

And all the things I didn't think
I wanted, cut like the lilac back
to the root, push up again
from underground.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Linda Pastan, 2011

Beauty Shop

What is sweeter than honey?
What is stronger than a lion?
           Samson to the Philistines


          1

Named for the archangel Michael
this twice-born barber
snips my hair, his scissors
describing a halo
around my head
as if I were to be a nun
or Jewish bride.


          2

I had forgotten
the shape
of the skull
defined by a wet comb,
and how my grandmother
braided my hair
so hard my eyes would ache.
She wore, in a silver locket
at her throat, the hair
of her long-dead child.


          3

In this place perfumed
with flowers
and singed hair, girls
with the lowered eyes
of penitents
make of each woman's nails
a row of shields.


          4

We are dreaming
of transformations,
of walking
into the world
somebody else.


          5

In Rome once
standing before Titian's
Sacred and Profane Love,
I gazed at the women,
each coiffed
in that luminous paint,
and wondered
which was which.


          6

I used to cut
my lover's hair myself.
Curls as delicate
as shaved wood
covered the floor,
and later the swaying curtain
of my hair
was all there was
between us.


          7

Hair line crack. . . .
Hair trigger. . . . Hair shirt. . . .
I cross a palm
with silver
and sense the pillars
shake.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Linda Pastan, 1988

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I'd tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Seamus Heaney, 1985