Thanks, Doug. I was searching for a copy of the poem to share with a local
writing group but couldn’t find the full poem online so I ended up typing
it out myself. Have loved this poem for ages. All stanzas after the first
should be inverted one tab.
The Violets
It is dusk, and cold. I kneel to pick
frail melancholy flowers among
ashes and loam. The melting west
is striped like ice-cream. While I try
whistling a trill, close by the nest
our blackbird frets and strops his beak
indifferent to Scarlatti’s song.
Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky
Towards nightfall waking from the fearful
half-sleep of a hot afternoon
at our first house in Mitchelton,
I ran to find my mother, calling
for breakfast. Laughing, ‘It will soon
be night, you goose,’ her long hair falling
down to her waist, she dried my tearful
face as I sobbed, ‘Where’s morning gone?’
and carried me downstairs to see
spring violets in their loamy bed.
Hungry and cross, I would not hold
their sweetness, or be comforted,
even when my father, whistling, came
from work, but used my tears to scold
the thing I could not grasp or name
that, while I slept, had stolen from me
those hours of unreturning light.
Into my father’s house we went,
young parents and their restless child,
to light the lamp and the wood stove
while dusk surrendered pink and white
to blurring darkness. Reconciled,
I took my supper and was sent
to innocent sleep.
Years cannot move
nor death’s disorienting scale
distort those lamplit presences:
a child with milk and story-book;
my father bending to inhale
the gathered flowers, with tenderness
stroking my mother’s goldbrown hair.
Stone-kerlews call from Kedron Brook.
Faint scent of violets drifts in the air.
Gwen Harwood
from Poems 1969-1974
Bill
On Wed, 10 Oct 2018 at 9:30 am, Doug Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> A kind of a find, Bill; taking your time to get there, but then, there it
> (she) is.
>
> Fun.
>
> Doug
> > On Oct 9, 2018, at 3:23 PM, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> > What can I have meant?
> >
> > The vi?
> >
> > A saved note on my iPad
> >
> >
> > The view?
> >
> > The vicissitudes of living in a tourist town
> >
> > as I do
> >
> >
> > The vinegar?
> >
> > A shopping list beginning?
> >
> > Surely not tapped on screen
> >
> >
> > Vika and Linda Bull tickets?
> >
> > No, Daylesford’s Wellness Festival
> >
> > has collapsed. And besides, The Vika?
> >
> >
> > Vicroads rego online?
> >
> > Nah, did that a couple of months ago
> >
> > Virgin flight? No, no holiday in the offing
> >
> >
> > Vision Australia? Searching for something
> >
> > for Mum, near-blind now. But again,
> >
> > not The Vision Australia
> >
> >
> > Narrowing down, the v
> >
> > is lower case
> >
> > The victory, The vice?
> >
> >
> > Clearly incomplete, why
> >
> > did I stop typing?
> >
> > Ah, I have it
> >
> >
> > Monday afternoon,
> >
> > seeking the Gwen Harwood poem
> >
> > with the blackbird fretting
> >
> >
> > thumbing my copy
> >
> > of Selected Poems, drawing a blank
> >
> > until it falls open on the broken spine
> >
> >
> > and there it is.
> >
> > It is dusk, and cold. I kneel to pick
> >
> > The violets.
> >
> >
> > bw
> >
> > ########################################################################
> >
> > To unsubscribe from the POETRYETC list, click the following link:
> > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=POETRYETC&A=1
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations & Continuations 2 (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=962
> Recording Dates
> (Rubicon Press)
>
> If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
> little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and
> sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
>
> Thomas De Quincey
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ########################################################################
>
> To unsubscribe from the POETRYETC list, click the following link:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=POETRYETC&A=1
>
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the POETRYETC list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=POETRYETC&A=1
|