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Elizabeth Madox Roberts
When they said the time to hide was mine,
I hid back under a thick grape vine.
And while I was still for the time to pass,
A little gray thing came out of the grass.
He hopped his way through the melon bed
And sat down close by a cabbage head.
He sat down close where I could see,
And his big still eyes looked hard at me,
His big eyes bursting out of the rim,
And I looked back very hard at him.
I STOOD in my window
looking at the double cherry :
A great height of white stillness.
Underneath a sky
the colour of milky grey jade.
Suddenly a crow flew between me and the tree —
Swooping, falling, in a shadow-black curve —
And blotted himself out in the blurred branches
of a leafless ash.
There he stayed for some time,
and I could only distinguish him by his
slight moving.
Then a wind caught the upper branches of the cherry,
And the long, white stems nodded up and down,
casually, to me in the window.
Nodded — but overhead the grey jade clouds
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she's unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality
But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
According to nature. For my sake she intervened
Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
Across the road.
My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains
My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who
out in woods I stay
longer than ice
longer than hurt
not able to stir all afternoon
the lash of a hard day
without any mirth
an old quarter horse
comes to a standstill in the road
standing
among the fallen
tuliptrees
“common though not abundant”
Liriodendron
tulipifera
massive trunks
the mechanics of rising sap
still a mystery
riffle-patterned bark
enough stillness
for algae
without me
my shoes so still
on the floor
Facing north
after the snowstorm
windless clouds.
It’s quiet here. The sky is cloudless. A moth flutters on
the most subtle of breezes. There’s barely a ripple on the
water. If reflections could speak, they would speak of
silence, of harmony and of deep introspection. Locked in
the aquatic mirror, a world of wonder stands fully
exposed to this image of itself. There is no judgment, no
criticism no need for redemption, just a picture of what is
here and now, a picture sprinkled with lily pads and
geese, a peaceful scene at perfect ease...
Bathed in echoes from the surface of the pond, each tree,
each reed, each leaf lives a fleeting second life entranced
in the liquid glass. The moth settles on a blade of marshgrass.
The great blue heron, common on the Island
Is a refugee from dirty water,
Not liking pollutants in the cold soup
She fishes for nourishment and flavour.
Look at the way she stands, as jokers say
With just one foot at a time in the water,
Counting herself a delicate creature
Subject to chills, although I've not seen her
Shift her stance from one leg to another
To disturb perfection in her figure
Surreally drawn, as if with a few strokes.
The chatter and movement of other bird
Sorts are not for her. Still as space she looks
Between her toes for fish, and when she moves
The lightning is more sudden than the stroke
She makes, I guess. Or if dissatisfied
Twice, perhaps, I have awakened surprised
by snow in the wide field. November: bare oak branches
like cast iron. A long breath drawn
down a blue canyon in my lungs.
A superb stillness, plenty of room.
My mind sits in a corner of such weather.
It sees a few men in brown clothes
cleaning an auditorium. They slam
metal folding-chairs back into two-dimensional
space. That sound echoes like gunshots across
the bare field between November and March.
Someone incinerates a newspaper
containing today’s weather forecast. My eyes
follow cinders and smoke into a pale sky,
into a dream of weather in which a storm
descends to devour my mind’s desires
The way
Blackbird
swallows
the silver
phial of
morning —
Her voice,
a water
-drop