a selection of poems

The delicate loveliness of the Spring blossoms all around us remind me of this beautifully observed and hopeful meditation by the American poet Robert Frost.

A Prayer In Spring

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,

The which it is reserved for God above

To sanctify to what far ends He will,

But which it only needs that we fulfil.

In the library with Malcolm Guite

Quarantine quatrains

During this period of lockdown, one of the books which Malcolm has been re-reading is 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam'. This has inspired him to write his own poems in the style of the famous translation by Edward Fitzgerald. A number are sombre reflections, or lamentations - which Rev. Deborah Perreau has reminded me are so important at times of distress, worry and sorrow.

Click on this link to read and hear Malcolm's complete quatrains.

The Grain of Things

I've recently added links to the cantata The Girl From Aleppo, for which poet and author Kevin Crossley-Holland wrote the text. Kevin has also, very kindly, given permission to print his poem The Grain of Things. As a number of critics have observed, Kevin's poems of landscapes - especially of East Anglia - and of apparently everyday things, have a distinctively spiritual quality of celebration: an awareness of the sacred in the seemingly mundane.

This is, I think, one of his finest and most uplifting poems: a plain speaker's desiderata, or maybe a countryman's credo.

The Grain of Things

Beware of what’s uniform, lapidary, slick.

As if a twisting country lane

where shadows bow and curtsy

were to be avoided

because of its green spine and blisters;

or it were desirable

that literary translations should not sound

foreign and close to the originals.

Waxen-skinned fruit is apt

to taste less sweet than the pocked potato

and ruckled pomegranate.

Let me have about me

not members of the awkward squad

or fools so cussed they cannot compromise,

but friends who think, and say

what they think, not given to repeat

themselves with variations;

men and women with robust wordbanks

who deal in things no less than intuitions

and cast their cloaks before the beautiful.

Salt-milled stone has its place.

Oil has its place.

Likewise the assembly line.

And no, I have no wish to be abraded

when I am low in spirits

or to listen to the litanies of the bigoted,

nor even to be pricked by the moustache

of an amorous woman!

But give me the gruff,

the honest stumble and crux -

the obstinate knot in the grain of things.