All that is eternal in me welcomes the wonder of this day, the field of brightness it creates offering time for each thing to arise and illuminate.
John O’ Donohue
Category: poetry
Hidden
Gnarled fingers reaching up into sunlit skies, feeling for stars.
Smiling Daffodils
Do Daffodils smile? Poets say they do. Walking on the sidewalk yesterday I came across these. I stopped and watched them rocking to and fro in the wind. I detected an expression of glee in their yellow faces, and then I saw it – they were smiling.
Eternity
Poets often speak of eternity within us. I find this hard to grasp. Perhaps I’m too literal and that’s fatal when it comes to poetry. But early this morning I was walking my little dog and experienced a sudden and heightened awareness of the new day. I found myself pondering on this new day’s connection to that long chain of days that have eternally flowed like waves to the shoreline, and at that moment, felt a fleeting sense of the eternal.
Stone Walls
I saw this wall at “The Friars” a Carmelite Priory. I loved the light and the scattered leaves, but the wall seemed a little intimidating. I was reminded of a section of Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.”
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Robert Frost
Trees
A short poem:
Trees
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.
Joyce Kilmer
Fire and Ice
I’ve decided, during this time of uncertainty, to learn off by heart a short poem or fragment of a poem, every second day. Here’s today’s from Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.”
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
I must say I too prefer fire, but thinking about it – give me both.
Daffodils
Yesterday, in the soft rain, I walked over to where we park our car. The sky and everything else seemed so grey – all a bit depressing. Then I saw them, pressed up against the trunk of a tree, a glorious clump of Daffodils. As I looked at them I was ushered into my day with a new sense of joy and vigour, and my mind turned to one of my favourite poets:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
To Be Amazed
Passed this lichen on my walk yesterday.
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I’ve always been a great admirer of the poetry and writings of Mary Oliver. The other day I was going through some notes of mine and came across these words of hers – deeply touching. Sadly, she died in January 2019.
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
She lived these words.
Champing The Grasses
This morning I stopped alongside a fence and listened to a horse grazing in the field. It was a beautiful sound, breathy and hollow with an echoing kind of chomp, punctuated now and then by the slight sound of the grinding of teeth. It was a lovely moment and I was transported back to some of the words of a favourite poem of mine, “The Listeners” by Walter de La Mare:
Is there anybody there? said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
I loved, and still love, the phrase – “The forest’s ferny floor” – I can go on saying it forever – “The forest’s ferny floor” – and I can hear his horse in the silence champing away at the grasses.
Snapshots Of My World 