Load

Henry Hillier Parker

Load

Today we carried home the last brown sheaf

and hookt the scythe against the dry barn wall:

the yellow border's on the chestnut leaf,

the beech leaf's yellow all.

Tomorrow we must bring the apples in,

they are as big as they shall ever be:

already starlings ready to begin

have tasted many a tree.

And in the garden, all the roses done,

the light lies gently, faint and almost cold,

on wither'd goldenrod and snapdragon

and tarnisht marigold.

John Hewitt

It is too easy to forget what the seasons really mean. Food! For the mouth and heart and eyes. And the different work that this entails. There was a time when the earth was closer to my everyday experience. But I have lost contact in many ways. Is it strange to find it in words, in poetry? Now, when I am walking the paved streets, I remember how it used to be. My mother in the garden, pulling up bright orange carrots, purple beets, washing them clean. Shelling peas, blanching endive, slicing green beans – each vegetable in its time, and time a succession of vegetable events. I miss earth time. Clock time is my conductor now, and it’s not the same.

Thank goodness for poetry and memory.

“Today we carried home the last brown sheaf.”

“Tomorrow we must bring the apples in.”

Canal Bank Walk

Carl Larsson

Canal Bank Walk



Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.



Patrick Kavanaugh
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin
 

“Grow with nature…” I like that. People as plants. I can’t say I comprehend this poem, but certain parts of it seem so true. (I’ve decided it’s good not to know everything, to be in the process of learning, and have a sense of my ignorance. We want answers, we think everything should be knowable, graspable, and as it were –masterable (not a word, I know). But what a miserable world that would be.)  The lines that really get to me are these – “O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web of fabulous grass and eternal voices…feed the gaping need of my senses…for this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven from green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.” I don’t know what Kavanaugh meant to say, but I do know that Eden-call, that longing for a world unworn, where I am new as well, clothed in field and sky, and growing with nature. Yes, I know that.