1 September 2022

Poem


A Lamentation

Where has she gone – our splendid summer
That danced upon these dewy swards
In gilded rays from newly risen suns
Attired in tambour lace and organdie?
We walked on timeless paths
That skirted fields under cirrus clouds
By old stone farms where little stirred
But reminiscence of times past
And heard yon plaintive cuckoo
From  forbidden woodland calling, calling.
 
Don’t say she has gone – our splendid summer
That lingered bout these byroads
From late May to St Giles’s Day
Bringing comfort, singing songs
Of easy living, stretching up to touch the sky
Where swifts and swallows cavorted on zephyrs
Wafting over barley turning gold. 
Now nights expand and promise cold
Down a  long black underpass we listen
For desolate mid-winter… calling, calling.

Photograph - Midsummer's Day 2022 
south of Barmston, East Yorkshire

23 comments:

  1. Original, YP? I enjoyed it; excellent poem.

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    1. Yes original Jenny. That opening line had been in my head for several days.

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  2. Time to book a Winter break me thinks YP. I am a December baby but I hate Winter. Bye bye my Summer love - Michael Jackson comes to mind. I really liked your Summer poem lament.

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    1. Thanks for reading it Dave. This will be an especially bitter winter given the fuel crisis.

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  3. I liked it; truly felt like the dog days of summer.

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  4. Beautiful photo and evocative poem. Although my grandfather's first cousin was a well-known Scottish poet, I apparently didn't inherit that gene. :)

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    1. I hope that first cousin was not William McGonagall.

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    2. No, but now I have to look him up. Many Scots have heard of my cousin but I doubt you will have. He went by Hugh MacDiarmid but his real name was Christopher Murray Grieve. (my last name is Grieve too!)

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    3. Wow! A chill just ran along my spine Margaret! I met Christopher Grieve at The University of Stirling in the mid-seventies. He had been invited there by a friend of his - another poet called Norman McCaig who was a lecturer at Stirling for a while. Chris (Hugh MacDiarmid) would have been in his early eighties and seemed remarkably grumpy. He came to read from and talk about his long poem "A Drunk Man Looks at The Thistle". He was a proud Scot but prouder by far to be a serious poet. Every word was weighed and measured and each had its purpose. How amazing that you bear his real name - Grieve.

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    4. Oh, wow, you met Chris? My grandfather, his first cousin John Grieve, was quiet and somewhat dour, but never grumpy at least. :) Another relative has a letter from Chris from around that time and he was very sick, cancer, I think? Many of us Grieves (including me) have The Hair. And proud of it!

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  5. Anonymous12:01 am

    That's very evocative. Today we are all about poetry.

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    1. Perhaps you should write a poem of your own Andrew - "Ode to R".

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  6. Beautiful shot. Lovely poem. Funny how summer's meaning is so different for those of us who live in a subtropical area. For us, fall's promise is a relief.

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    1. It's a difference that has often crossed my mind Mary.

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  7. Very appropriate. For about two weeks now, I have been having an almost overwhelming feeling of inevitability. Not just about the season changing.

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    1. The sense of dread in this poem points to something more sinister than the natural rhythm of the seasons.

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  8. I like the picture more than the poem. Fancy words scramble my brain.

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  9. Truly a lament, YP., and the photo has a certain melancholy feel.

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    1. The winter ahead will be more onerous than most - even if the temperature rarely drops below freezing.

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  10. That was not my experience of this summer at all. I found it quite miserable, actually, and I'm ready for some rain and cool temperatures!

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    1. It wasn't meant to be a news report.

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