As The Year Ends

WHB … Pen & Ink – 1988

Dark the swollen river runs
Under the bridge’s shades of grey.
Slate sky condemns the passive scene
Draining colour from the day.

Tree silhouettes outline my view
Their winter ribs bared to the frost
December bids the old year gone
With no regrets for what is lost. 

The year expires; bid it goodbye, 
It brought distress, re-kindled fears,
It promised much it failed to give,
Left little hope and many tears.

So now, in hope of better times,
Tomorrow holds the future’s key.
New perspectives flood my view
Blue skies as far as I can see.

 

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Lost and Never Found

If I speak with melancholy
If you sense despair,
Think no more of it
I have not quit –
It is a mask I wear.

One which, for sure, I do not relish;
I am not given to gloom.
Yet all unbidden,
No truth forbidden,
I cannot help but speak of doom.

For once upon a wintertime,
Hoar frost upon the ground,
I lost my love
To Him above:
Never again to be found.

Winter Haiku

Photo by Raine Nectar on Pexels.com

As darkness descends

Nature catches breath and sleeps

Awaiting rebirth

 

 

The GREEN MAN

‘Green Man’ . . . Pen&Wash – WHB ©

The GREEN MAN

He is my history
Lusting after the hills of my youth
He strides the moorland paths
Amidst the bracken and the gorse
Drinking the sun’s warm ale
Savouring the wind’s heather-toned tang
Turning time to his advantage
Tuning in to its connecting wavelength

He is great Nature’s spirit
Rising and falling with its moods
Sad yet serene in Spring
Holding the hope of the future

Bright and bubbly in the summer rains
Rich and expansive in the sun’s bright gaze

Brought to magnificent autumn richness
Coloured by russet tints
Fruitful in his beneficence

He is the winter too
Drifting with the whiteness of its moods
His flocks penned for winter warmth neath the mountain crag
Shielding the gentle crocus
And the blanched snowdrop

He is the spirit of the trees
Lord of copse and wood
Guardian of Grove and greenwood
Verdant Monarch of the forest

Of the landscape’s lakes
Running with the cool waters of streams and rivers
The stillness of Its ponds and pools

Both past and future
Gone yet still to come again
his cyclic journey unfolds
From birth to death
From death to resurrection
To new life and resurgent hope
Maintaining existence
Midst promises and threats
To bring renewal in the name of life

SPRING

As earth sleeps
And winter thrives
My heart with the season rests
I await in peace,
I live in hope
Of new growth life attests

As winter ends
Ceases its hold
As daffodils emerge
So life releases
Love again
Its impulse and its urge.

The primrose wakes
Me to the spring
Its milky yellow songs
Sing to me
In gentle tones
Of where my heart belongs

Which is where life
And lust exist
Side by side in joy
So has it ever
always been
Since I was just a boy

And now that I
Am old and wise
Content to face my fate
I look on spring
And with it sing
New life to celebrate.

 

Photographs: WHB . . . Surrey – March 10th 2018   ©

 

Three Cinquains

A cinquain is a five-line poem, normally without rhyme, but with a specific syllable count of 2-4-6-8-2.  The form was invented by Adelaide Crapsey, an American poet who took her inspiration from Japanese haiku and tanka.  As with most other poetic forms, the cinquaine has since been developed to encompass a variety of ways, whilst always holding to Crapsey’s basic formula.

The following amplification is taken from: ‘The Cinquain’ ByDeborah Kolodii, as published on the  ‘Shadow Poetry’  website …

The ideal cinquain for Crapsey was one that worked up to a turn or climax, and then fell back. Similar to the “twist” that often occurs in the final couplet of a sonnet, a cinquain’s “turn” usually occurs during the final, shorter fifth line or immediately before it. Thus, the momentum of a cinquain grows with each subsequent line as another two syllables, … (are) added bringing the poem to a climax at the fourth line, falling back to a two syllable “punch line”.

Adelaide Crapsey

In another of my occasional attempts at structuring my poetic thoughts into a (to me) new poetic form, I give below three of my own examples of the CINQUAINE.

 

My life
Lives in my work
Searching for the right words
Seeking to make them tell the truth
Poet

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Regrets
Are not for me
Rather, let the past rest
Whilst I live on in the present
With hope

---

 

Winter
Ends as the Spring
Advances with new life
Bringing hope and joy to us all
Rebirth

Sara Teasdale – ‘A Winter Night’

 [  No.70 of my favourite short poems  ]

Winter Night … Pen & Wash – WHB

A Winter Night

My windowpane is starred with frost,
The world is bitter cold tonight,
The moon is cruel, and the wind
Is like a two-edged sword to smite.

God pity all the homeless ones,
The beggars pacing to and fro.
God pity all the poor tonight
Who walk the lamp lit streets of snow.

My room is like a bit of June,
Warm and close-curtained fold on fold,
But somewhere, like a homeless child,
My heart is crying in the cold.

 

by Sara Teasdale

 

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NOTES:  (adapted from Wikipedia) . . . 

Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933) was an American lyric poet.  She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouti, and used the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger after her marriage in 1914.  . . .  From 1911 to 1914  Teasdale was courted by several men, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was truly in love with her but did not feel that he could provide enough money or stability to keep her satisfied.  (In 1914) she chose to marry Ernst Filsinger, a long-time admirer of her poetry  . . .  In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection ‘Love Songs’  . . .  In 1933, she died by suicide, overdosing on sleeping pills.  Lindsay had died by suicide two years earlier.

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Winter Holds Court

The River Thames at Chertsey, Surrey:  Photos – WHB   ©

 

Bare limbs against the furnace of the sky
The stillness of the river mirrors all
Winter holds court in autumn’s dying sigh
Bringing its own beauty to the ball

 

Photos – WHB

River Thames at Chertsey

Thoughts On A Morning Mist

‘A Sussex Morning’ … Photo: WHB – October 2017   ©

 

The morning mist that masks my view
Slowly lifts its damask shroud
Then memory comes to lift my mood
Bringing to mind that distant scene
Reminding of what my life has been

For then, before I lost, I’d loved,
And she has meant the world to me
In spring and summer life was good
Till autumn brought its golden glow
Gnarled time revealing what I now know.

That when those masking clouds descend
Proffering winter’s icy blasts
Our world which once held such delights
Tells me that now the time is here
To set aside despair and fear

That what we had and valued most
Was all worthwhile and counted more
Than all the pains which followed on
For life renews itself in hope
And those who follow, they will cope.

Edna St. Vincent Millay – ‘“What lips my lips have kissed’

(No.60 of my favourite short poems)

This Sonnet is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an American poet and playwright who was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1892.  I find it a moving and poignant poem looking back on her more youthful days with regret and intense longing.  Her sonnet is written in the Italian form, divided into two parts – an eight-lined octet, followed by a six-line sestet, here presented as just two sentences.  It is both reflective and filled with remorse.

Millay’s first published poem, ‘Renascence‘ was particularly well received and launched her on her writing career.  For a large part of her life Millay lived and worked among her Bohemian friends in New York’s Greenwich Village milieu.  Known to her friends as Vincent, she was openly bisexual, and gradually accrued both fame and some notoriety.   In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver’.   Edna St Vincent Millay died in 1950.

 

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

 

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.