Growth, movement.
It walks this greening sweetness
Throughout all the earth,
Where sky and sun tender its habits
As I would yours.
Published in Poetry (London), 4, 14, 1948.
Transgression
At first God wanted just himself.
And this huge output of light whirled in horror
Throughout the heavens with nothing very much to do.
Knowing evil and good he was bored.
Knowing life he was really fed up,
So he set up like an artist to fulfil his daily needs,
And wandered from the first day and entered the second.
This was the layering of the mists.
And God not seeing what was under his foot
Called this the second day.
The third day God saw what was emerging beneath him.
The green mist and undulation of land and water:
Its modulated rhythm and irritability of split forms
Spitting up from the earth’s face massed fronds
And circular prisms of light.
These he watched, startled, until there evolved
The springing active branches of varied leaves,
Plants, shrubs and trees. A dishevelled array;
A residue of years impelling change of growth.
The reptiles unknown to him but already in birth
Peered at his curiosity and their own under a
Blanching light. The mammals also secure on
The tree of life and hidden by its enormous branches of
Passing mystery, clutched the young to their breasts.
On the fourth day the stars appeared in stern formation
But were obscured by the sun’s warrior rays.
The evening of the fourth day found them poxed.
They shone with anger rather than with grace
And fulfilled no heavenly place.
The moon yielded a false light and all things
Living swayed with uneasiness and took
Note of each other… interchanging and companionable…
The secret of life stirred in their blood.
And this the serpent termed fear. And he was right,
For God disappeared that night into the mist.
By the fifth day God returned to travail and
Travelled with rage over his whole continent
His potent wrath aroused birds of splendid hue and pattern
Whirls of magical and myriad moths, flocks of all
Shocked shapes and colour, all whirling, half-flying
Rumbling above the earth, rising surprised at the sight of
His terror. Then having risen once they subsided in mist.
Now let man arise.
And he came with his green shell of a body with tender
Hue out of the greening mist.
The light of God warmed and floodlit his powerless frame
And dissolved his paralytic fear and mission of no sense.
He came forward stretching for guidance.
God weakened by certain loss of his creative flame
Isolated this creature…
Who soon became truculent with too much light.
Eve arose indignant at his side. She was not created
Life compelled her forward. She held no scruples
And immediately sought the forbidden tree.
For this written evidence and graft of truth
We can be truly grateful.
Now at the end of this sixth day God having
Set his bait, fell away under his immortal palms
To quibble with his conscience. The garden was too large to
Till, and he had not given them their freedom.
The cows Eve said were the only bit of sense.
So God mused on the seventh day and lazed among the hills,
And Eve spying him out asleep against the hedge
Shouted, and knew herself to be a shrew.
This, she said, and meant it for thousands of years after,
‘Boss, this is a man’s game it is the religion of man
Just who created woman and where do we come in…
The seventh day is lousy it is our worst ever.’
Published in Wales, VIII, 30 November 1948.
The Hypnotist (Welsh Englyn)
A fox stared and outstared me – in a wood;
In a mood of false glee
I mocked his audacity,
Now he haunts me near that tree.
Published in Poetry (Chicago), 81, 1952–3.
Love is an Outlaw
Love is an outlaw that cannot be held
Within the small confines and laws of man:
Rather it will turn, as a planet can,
Man upside down, like a first line fabled
In a notebook lightly pencilled upon
To change his sense of direction. Dimpled
Wisely like an unbridled child, love is pebbled
With smooth water and myths: a glazed swan
Shadowed in reeds: a ray of light waylaid
On swiftly moving motes. Wholesome love attends
Its own shape, warm and shining. The man who tends
The herds and street lights symbols of its trade:
It is a pacing Genesis on two legs,
Dispossessing man who unapparelled begs.
Published in Poetry (Chicago), 81, 1952–3.
These Words I Write on Crinkled Tin
To these green woods where I found my love:
To the green wood where I held my love:
To the green wood now my love is gone.
I follow death that stands on my breath,
My heart cut out by the timeless scythe,
All grievous foliage stifling and still.
I carve marks on the bark’s rough edge
To convince my grief he came here once
Whose spirit shivers the aspen tree.
To the green wood where the woodcock flies,
To the green wood where the nightjar hides,
To the green wood with red eyes of a dove.
The young jays springing and curious
Who peck eyes from the lamb’s sweet face,
Resemble too well my heartless step.
For he loves me and I love another,
I love another yet he still loves me,
He loves me still yet I love another.
To the green wood where the green air fades;
To the green wood fluid with icy shades;
To the green wood afraid I follow fast:
Past Syrian Juniper and tall grass;
Hanging with dark secrets the Brewer’s spruce;
The pond that drew the young child in;
Among darkening leaves: a nightingale
Sobbing in the sunniest season,
‘My love, my Love, why do I love another?’
To the green wood where I found my love;
To the green wood where I held my love;
To the green wood now my love is gone.
Published in Poetry (Chicago), 81, 1952–3.
Two Wine Glasses
A pencil left in her sweet room,
If love is true then sing our tune,
Lovers always know their doom.
And his cool mind the pencils know,
And his pained eyes her hands attune,
Lovers’ glasses wine-rimmed flow:
Two glasses share each smile and pun,
These favoured two none else would do,
Held a secret… death sought one…
Amid the trees, and books on art,
In sun such greenwood songs grew blue,
Filtered through their drinking heart.
Now stiff in death like icing cake;
And green as moon the grasses’ hue;
Only one now drinks and waits:
But she whom death has iced away
Soon breaks in glassy
fragments two
Birds and flowers from out her spray.
A pencil left in her sweet tomb,
If love is true then sing our tune,
Lovers always know their doom.
Published in Poetry (Chicago), 82, 1953.
Ty Gwyn
A whirl of cobalt birds against
A cerulean sky, flashing light and seen
Through the rigid hand holding a vase
Of cornucopian grace.
Window, falling back like a concertina,
Mellow mild happiness.
A pink distempered warmth
A rainbow of books, only the day
Grey and dishevelled surrounds the village
Like straying hoofs.
A chart of bird songs, prints, and
Two china dogs shine wisely from the shelf.
The orange-scarlet brazier of coals,
Flickering flames mauve, red and green;
The crimson heart encircling my love
Photographed in the cabbage patch.
Published in Poetry (Chicago), 82, 1953.
The ‘Pele’ Fetched In
The ‘pele’ fetched in. Water
Cracked, broken and watered down
Carried into the home. Sticks
Chopped on the iron top yard,
Then suddenly the snow. The sky opened
And out of it shed, these floating flakes
Dazzling blinding all earth’s features
Her smaller troubles and unfinished tasks
Covered by a huge silence.
‘Pele’ = mixture of coal dust, clay + water’ [LR’s note].
A Shot Rabbit
Sitting in the emerald of twilight
And I its singular flaw,
Whose eyes like forgotten stars droop
Nebulously into distant light years.
Wishing the past as dark as night
And the future all light, clarity’s rays.
Yet knowing obscurely
At some central motive of my being,
That all will arise, all turn,
Encircle me, as the light years have spun
Invisibly around their gravel point.
Llanstephan Madrigal
Through the trees… sea,
Down to the sea-lanes… sea,
Sea downs, downstream,
Pools and prisms of water.
Black at its nightfall,
Wretched in its vapours,
White-pitched and
Pure in its daystream.
Sweet, meadowsweet air,
Quiet pastures sloping
Down, down to the sea,
Towards their own mirror
And sea, sea of perfection.
Displaced Persons
For seven days the dawn,
And on each day a fresh fold of sky
Until the fifth, when a thick glow
Spread like a heath fire, and the fields,
Farm and hedges lay beneath like a Welsh
Quilt frozen stiff upon the washing line.
Wailing, the birds, like no other day
Would come suddenly, fly away at the sight
Then flutter down from all sides,
All kinds together.
Neither from the frosted leaf nor from
The grey hard ground could they find
Relief. They were no longer birds but
Beings searching after food, spirits of flesh.
Peering at,- out of the trees.
[Handwritten comment by T.S. Eliot at the bottom of page: ‘Rough. but interesting’.]
Saint Swithin’s Pool
I’ll not wash now Mam
The big red earth will
Rise in my face as I
Open the drill…
I’ll wash tonight.
And he died and lay
In the drill and the big
Red earth covered his face;
And he said this Saint Swithin
Now I am dead I can have
My wash, and it rained this day,
Next, and every day since.
Brazilian Blue
If I could create one tree
And hang it in the sky
And spray it with the living
Gold of the sun, and hold
The natural pattern of its growth,
I would say that I had done
More than enough.
But observe when the sun
Has set against the black
Edge of the leaves,
How other leaves seem
To drift from one
Branch to another, or
Were they birds against
This darkwinged Brazilian sky?
Wings that edge the
São Paolo woods.
This flitting by,
This sudden appearance,
And inconsequence of time,
Is the moment I would
Hold before you;
Tomorrow evening it will
Have gone.
It Was Not Easy
And as the log burnt up and bright
So we shared our simple pleasures;
And as the grate cooled and grew ashly
We fed at poverty’s gate;
Suffering persecution and equal bars
Of discomfort. It was not easy.
It is not. In spite of the tempest raging
Over the planet’s calm green face.
Chapel Wrath
Fields of camomile and clover
Wet and green as the lakes of Peru
Guarding Chapel deaths and their
Domineering graded stones padlocked
behind a spiked iron fence. The
Jealousies and jockeying for space,
Like chessmen where one move
Could shake the boards of death;
Where pawns can eliminate a queen,
Peasant, a squire’s disgraceful scene.
The now sad plighted machine-lettered century
Leaving no culture of their own, but a
Metallic copy of their earlier neighbours,
Whose deep set letters on shoulders of slate
Announced their death with the pride
Of a spirited horse.
Trials and Tirades
Concrete slabs measured overnight into
A façade of walls. The top flat with its
New pane of vitamin glass, reflecting
A precipitous green of sky, of weird
Accumulator hue. No curtain out of
A square white room: but tree shadows tremulous
On ceiling. The parallel beams of sun
Shimmering with neon springs of air.
A chromium chair, and wider day of light;
A workshop from where ourselves we lean
Over sill and table: yet do remain surrounded
By boarding brothels: and through the lurid
Hours of dawn, face up to a firing squad
Who would not have us write and type
Not at that time of night!
Angharad
Eyelashes like barley hairs,
Calm – sweet sighs
Absolving her angry
Interval like water
Overcasting fire. Shrill
Cries dissolving. Gurgles
And blue pool eyed caves
Stretch like a sewin of tantrums
And rest under the water’s wave.
Prydein
Stern pattern cut.
A frosty child
Writhing with seasoned tooth
Purple headed and radiating
Rays of piercing pity, –
Poison and fissure distress.
Out of a Sixth Sense
Out of the hot womb into the cold night breeze,
Out of a synthesis of mist and winter pain,
Dark green ivy on wet branched trees,
Sprang to birth my son
From his own mother
&nb
sp; Revealed
Overjoyed
God’s blessing from His mightiest word.
Green Madrigal [II]
Green gregarious green
Dredged into the very roots,
Lighting up a shine of green
Green light bathing the earth.
The whither-thither of splendid leaves
Rollicking in the spring of the sky:
The wind breathes the branches apart,
To the core of its heartwood
And resilient rays.
Dark-glowering leaf pattern,
A spread of flaming black
Radiates at the tip of each blade,
Fixes an impregnable pattern
Of stoic growth of purpose,
In such a purposeless world.
Premonition
When fold of iron blue and
Rolls of sparse corotesque grass
Recede further and further away
Leaving a multitude of space
Taking as you go
The salutation from my side
I imperceptibly accept the pale
Night and its immense face
In which to hide my frozen fear.
Mockery
If you have your heart in a thing
Work or person and this is mocked at,
Then this is death.
It is a crack in the heart
That saps your pulse away
Into a damp pattern.
That flattens the mind
Like mountain ash against the sky
With frost crouched close at its heel.
Red Mullet
Very strange is this fish and gift,
Instinctively it has a myth;
Caves of Poseidon watch it drift
Towards Medusa’s opal plinth,
Orphic chants on pink scaled nights
Resemble well my lover’s rites.
The Tavern
With eyes like tired skies and shifting explosion
Of nerves; these saints of Bloomsbury, blue bulls
And poodle men, sniff out their congested haunts,
Shelve, or move on a drink scrounge to a plaid green pub.
Sneer over plastic tables at the empty glass;
Drink – in caustic celebrities to upbraid them –
When their own minds warn them of defeat –
That ‘they are as phoney as a porterhouse steak’
Then to return in rubbled muddle, with flashing
Ties and black picoted nails; round and out
Into the bleak night of streets; down coffered cellars:
To peony papered walls: broken beds: chip and bacon whores.
The Temple Road
There was a carpenter at my door,
And the smell and sound of the paint blew into
My nostrils and ears, and gathered
My thoughts, as I looked out of the window
With my hands warm among the washing socks
To the wet earth sodden with too much water
And the green plants persisting
Among the cavernous ruins.
And this I remembered.
It was a long time ago and they were
Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Page 12