Poetry

Only simplify

a sea rolling high
STC

Just simple words, a simple voice and its feeling, green common on which to feed, shaft of mote-light through my glass transparency, and where did my lover go, and why did he go and leave me, here alone with thorn and babe, beneath blind Skiddaw’s oblivious height, chaste moon shining on my greedy appetite, hunger of the sense, for me and mine and nature’s power, calm and equable and contained, do you hear that echo ‘mid the shouting birds?, do you see with your eye the shattering cataract’s still and fearful majesty?, self o self in prayer meditation composition, light of the heart received and given, words’ vision, freeholder’s dream, the giant child with his elemental monstrous daddy in the mountains, rocks, streams and lakes, have you seen the owl a-hooting so, the pastoral lambs a-skipping-o, mighty voice, mightier mind, self-creating, self-sustaining, low as the mole in ages dug, high as the sky-lark’s hover ‘tween matter-of-fact old earth and palace-heights of cloud, do you not sense the brooding of the dove, with Milton’s burr over waters clear as Shakspear’s heart?, England, spiritual, sensuous, passionate, beating with the ancient loping pulse along the incarnadine rivers of the blood, France, abstract, manic, morbid, running with tyrannical rivers of blood, o my memory, court of noble kings, the Moses of my understanding, the Druid of my primitive faith, the gawky boy with the immortal slouch, the mad old woman who still cannot speak, the tender pastor under dripping trees, the two strange Friends who laid on kindly hands, the garrulous knight with the generous purse, I am a man and little else amongst my solid dreams of companionship, country roads that end, like lines do end, in infinite white, violent visions on an empty mountain-top, woman and man hand in hand along the genial lake-bright way, and all besides the imagining mind, intense with nature, sees its ghost, like the shadow of colossus, dark against the mounting clouds, accompanied by substantial grace, insubstantial feeling simple as the heart before the lingering dawn.

The old man stumbles amongst ragwort and celandine, mud in his eye as the Duddon flows laughing by.

Adam Piette