by Laurie Lee
There is hunger in the mouth
of vole and badger,
silver agonies of breath
in the nostril of the fox,
ice on the rabbit’s paw.
Tonight has no moon,
no food for the pilgrim;
the fruit tree is bare,
the rose bush a thorn
and the ground bitter with stones.
But the mole sleeps, and the hedgehog
lies curled in a womb of leaves,
the bean and the wheat-seed
hug their germs in the earth
and the stream moves under the ice.
Tonight there is no moon,
but a new star opens
like a silver trumpet over the dead.
Tonight in a nest of ruins
the blessèd babe is laid.
And the fir tree warms to a bloom of candles,
the child lights his lantern,
stares at his tinselled toy;
our hearts and hearths
smoulder with live ashes.
In the blood of our grief
the cold earth is suckled,
in our agony the womb
convulses its seed,
in the last cry of anguish
the child’s first breath is born.
Poem for Easter
Wrapped in his shroud of wax, his swoon of wounds,
still as a winter’s star he lies with death.
Still as a winter’s lake his stark limbs lock
the pains that run in stabbing frosts around him.
Star in the lake, grey spark beneath the ice,
candle of love snuffed in its whitened flesh.
I, too, lie bound within your dawn of cold
while on my breath the serpent mortal moans.
O serpent in the egg, become a rod,
crack the stone shell that holds his light in coil.
O grief within the serpent sink your root
and bear the flower for which our forked tongues wail.
Cold in their hope our mortal eyes forgather,
wandering like moths about the tomb’s shut mouth;
Waiting the word the riven rock shall utter,
waiting the dawn to fly its bird of god.
April Rise
If ever I saw blessing in the air
I see it now in this still early day
Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips
Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.
Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round
Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod
Splutters with soapy green, and all the world
Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.
If ever I heard blessing it is there
Where birds in trees that shoals and shadows are
Splash with their hidden wings and drops of sound
Break on my ears their crests of throbbing air.
Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates,
The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,
While white as water by the lake a girl
Swims her green hand among the gathered swans.
Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,
Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;
Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,
If ever world were blessèd, now it is.
First Love
That was her beginning, an apparition
of rose in the unbreathed airs of his love,
her heart revealed by the wash of summer
sprung from her childhood’s shallow stream.
Then it was that she put up her hair,
inscribed her eyes with a look of grief,
while her limbs grew as curious as coral branches,
her breast full of secrets.
But the boy, confused in his day’s desire,
was searching for herons, his fingers bathed
in the green of walnuts, or watching at night
the Great Bear spin from the maypole star.
It was then that he paused in the death of a game,
felt the hook of her hair on his swimming throat,
saw her mouth at large in the dark river
flushed like a salmon.
But he covered his face and hid his joy
in a wild-goose web of false directions,
and hunted the woods for eggs and glow-worms,
for rabbits tasteless as moss.
And she walked in fields where the crocuses
branded her feet, and mares’ tails sprang
from the prancing lake, and the salty grasses
surged round her stranded body.
The Long War
Less passionate the long war throws
its burning thorn about all men,
caught in one grief, we share one wound,
and cry one dialect of pain.
We have forgot who fired the house,
whose easy mischief spilt first blood,
under one raging roof we lie
the fault no longer understood.
But as our twisted arms embrace
the desert where our cities stood,
death’s family likeness in each face
must show, at last, our brotherhood.
Moss-Rose
My mother would grow roses with each hand,
drawing them forth from country-frothing air.
Draw them, shape them, cut them from the thorn;
lay them like bleeding shells about the house.
And with my ears to the lips of those shell-roses
I harked to their humming seas, secret as hives.
And with my lips to those same rose-shell ears
I spoke my crimson words, my stinging brain.
With lips, ears, eyes, and every finger’s nerve,
I moved, moth-throbbing, round each creviced fire.
As I do now, lost mother, country gone,
groping my grief around your moss-rose heart.
Bird
O bird that was my vision,
my love, my dream that flew
over the famine-folded rocks,
the sky’s reflected snow.
O bird that found and fashioned me,
that brought me from the land
safe in her singing cage of bone,
the webbed wings of her hand.
She took me to the topmost air,
curled in the atom of her eye,
and there I saw an island rise
out of the empty sea.
And falling there she set me down
naked on soil that knew no plough,
and loveless, speechless, I beheld
the world’s beginning grow.
And there I slew her for my bread
and in her feathers dressed;
and there I raised a paradise
from the seed in her dead breast.
Black Edge
I lie no more in a healthy sheet,
a wind of chill eyes makes a marsh of my cheeks,
diseased is my sleep with demented sound
and I am infected by the stars.
For see how the sun rubs ulcers in the sky,
how black as bats the field flowers droop and fall;
the earth, the sweet earth
is foul and full of graves.
O save me, for I am sick:
lay on my eyelids your finger’s mirac
le,
bewitch me that I may live.
Wash me in happy air,
restore me with the odour of rivers;
then feed, O feed
my sight with your normal love.
Thistle
Thistle, blue bunch of daggers
rattling upon the wind,
saw-tooth that separates
the lips of grasses.
Your wound in childhood was
a savage shock of joy
that set the bees on fire
and the loud larks singing.
Your head enchanted then
smouldering among the flowers
filled the whole sky with smoke
and sparks of seed.
Now from your stabbing bloom’s
nostalgic point of pain
ghosts of those summers rise
rustling across my eyes.
Seeding a magic thorn
to prick the memory,
to start in my icy flesh
fevers of long lost fields.
My Many-Coated Man
Under the scarlet-licking leaves,
through bloody thought and bubbly shade,
the padded, spicy tiger moves –
a sheath of swords, a hooded blade.
The turtle on the naked sand
peels to the air his pewter snout
and rubs the sky with slotted shell –
the heart’s dismay turned inside out.
The rank red fox goes forth at night
to bite the gosling’s downy throat,
then digs his grave with panic claws
to share oblivion with the stoat.
The mottled moth, pinned to a tree,
woos with his wings the bark’s disease
and strikes a fungoid, fevered pose
to live forgotten and at ease.
Like these, my many-coated man
shields his hot hunger from the wind,
and, hooded by a smile, commits
his private murder in the mind.
Summer Rain
Where in the valley the summer rain
Moves crazed and chill through the crooked trees
The briars bleed green, and the far fox-banks
Their sharp cries tangle in sobbing shades.
I hear the sad rinsing of reeded meadows
The small lakes rise in the wild white rose
The shudder of wings in the streaming cedars
And tears of lime running down from the hills.
All day in the tomb of my brain I hear
The cold wheat whisper, the veiled trees mourn,
And behold through windows of weighted ivy
The wet walls blossom with silver snails.
The heron flies up from the stinging waters,
The white swan droops by the dripping reed,
And summer lies swathed in its ripeness, exuding
Damp odours of lilies and alabaster.
In a fever of June she is wrapped and anointed
With deathly sweating of cold jasmine,
And her petals weep wax to the thick green sky
Like churchyard wreaths under domes of glass.
Too long hangs the light in the valley lamenting,
The slow rain sucking the sun’s green eye;
And too long do you hide in your vault of clay
While I search for your passion’s obliterate stone.
Let the dark night come, let it crack of doom
The sky’s heart shatter and empty grief,
The storm fetch its thunder of hammers and axes,
The green hills break as our graves embrace.
Field of Autumn
Slow moves the acid breath of noon
over the copper-coated hill,
slow from the wild crab’s bearded breast
the palsied apples fall.
Like coloured smoke the day hangs fire,
taking the village without sound;
the vulture-headed sun lies low
chained to the violet ground.
The horse upon the rocky height
rolls all the valley in his eye,
but dares not raise his foot or move
his shoulder from the fly.
The sheep, snail-backed against the wall.
lifts her blind face but does not know
the cry her blackened tongue gives forth
is the first bleat of snow.
Each bird and stone, each roof and well,
feels the gold foot of autumn pass;
each spider binds with glittering snare
the splintered bones of grass.
Slow moves the hour that sucks our life,
slow drops the late wasp from the pear,
the rose tree’s thread of scent draws thin -
and snaps upon the air.
Day of these Days
Such a morning it is when love
leans through geranium windows
and calls with a cockerel’s tongue.
When red-haired girls scamper like roses
over the rain-green grass,
and the sun drips honey.
When hedgerows grow venerable,
berries dry black as blood,
and holes suck in their bees.
Such a morning it is when mice
run whispering from the church,
dragging dropped ears of harvest.
When the partridge draws back his spring
and shoots like a buzzing arrow
over grained and mahogany fields.
When no table is bare,
and no breast dry,
and the tramp feeds off ribs of rabbit.
Such a day it is when time
piles up the hills like pumpkins,
and the streams run golden.
When all men smell good,
and the cheeks of girls
are as baked bread to the mouth.
As bread and bean flowers
the touch of their lips
and their white teeth sweeter than cucumbers.
Boy in Ice
O river, green and still,
By frost and memory stayed,
Your dumb and stiffened glass divides
A shadow and a shade.
In air, the shadow’s face
My winter gaze lets fall
To see beneath the stream’s bright bars
That other shade in thrall.
A boy, time-fixed in ice,
His cheeks with summer dyed,
His mouth, a rose-devouring rose,
His bird-throat petrified.
O fabulous and lost,
More distant to me now
Than rock-drawn mammoth, painted stag
Or tigers in the snow.
You stare into my face
Dead as ten thousand years,
Your sparrow tongue sealed in my mouth
Your world about my ears.
And till our shadows meet,
Till time burns through the ice,
Thus frozen shall we ever stay
Locked in this paradise.
The Edge of Day
The dawn’s precise pronouncement waits
With breath of light indrawn,
Then forms with smoky, smut-red lips
The great O of the sun.
The mouldering atoms of the dark
Blaze into morning air;
The birdlike
stars droop down and die,
The starlike birds catch fire.
The thrush’s tinder throat strikes up,
The sparrow chips hot sparks
From flinty tongue, and all the sky
Showers with electric larks.
And my huge eye a chaos is
Where molten worlds are born;
Where floats the eagle’s flaming moon,
And crows, like clinkers, burn;
Where blackbirds scream with comet tails,
And flaring finches fall,
And starlings, aimed like meteors,
Bounce from the garden wall;
Where, from the edge of day I spring
Alive for mortal flight,
Lit by the heart’s exploding sun
Bursting from night to night.
Twelfth Night
No night could be darker than this night,
no cold so cold,
as the blood snaps like a wire,
and the heart’s sap stills,
and the year seems defeated.
O never again, it seems, can green things run,
or sky birds fly,
or the grass exhale its humming breath
powdered with pimpernels,
from this dark lung of winter.
Yet here are lessons for the final mile
of pilgrim kings;
the mile still left when all have reached
their tether’s end: that mile
where the Child lies hid.
For see, beneath the hand, the earth already
warms and glows;
for men with shepherd’s eyes there are
signs in the dark, the turning stars,
the lamb’s returning time.
Out of this utter death he’s born again,
his birth our saviour;
from terror’s equinox he climbs and grows,
drawing his finger’s light across our blood -
the sun of heaven, and the son of god.
The Easter Green
Not dross, but dressed with good,
Is this gold air;
Not bald nor bare
But bearded like a god
Grown old more fair.
Dazed from the pit I see
Glazes of holy light
On day and diamond night;
