November

George Clausen

November

The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
And, if the sun looks through, tis with a face
Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,
When done the journey of her nightly race,
Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place.
For days the shepherds in the fields may be,
Nor mark a patch of sky – blindfold they trace,
The plains, that seem without a bush or tree,
Whistling aloud by guess, to flocks they cannot see.

The timid hare seems half its fears to lose,
Crouching and sleeping ‘neath its grassy lair,
And scarcely startles, though the shepherd goes
Close by its home, and dogs are barking there;
The wild colt only turns around to stare
At passer by, then knaps his hide again;
And moody crows beside the road forbear
To fly, tho’ pelted by the passing swain;
Thus day seems turn’d to night, and tries to wake in vain.

The owlet leaves her hiding-place at noon,
And flaps her grey wings in the doubling light;
The hoarse jay screams to see her out so soon,
And small birds chirp and startle with affright;
Much doth it scare the superstitious wight,
Who dreams of sorry luck, and sore dismay;
While cow-boys think the day a dream of night,
And oft grow fearful on their lonely way,
Fancying that ghosts may wake, and leave their graves by day.

Yet but awhile the slumbering weather flings
Its murky prison round – then winds wake loud;
With sudden stir the startled forest sings
Winter’s returning song – cloud races cloud,
And the horizon throws away its shroud,
Sweeping a stretching circle from the eye;
Storms upon storms in quick succession crowd,
And o’er the sameness of the purple sky
Heaven paints, with hurried hand, wild hues of every dye.

At length it comes among the forest oaks,
With sobbing ebbs, and uproar gathering high;
The scared, hoarse raven on its cradle croaks,
And stockdove-flocks in hurried terrors fly,
While the blue hawk hangs o’er them in the sky.
The hedger hastens from the storm begun,
To seek a shelter that may keep him dry;
And foresters low bent, the wind to shun,
Scarce hear amid the strife the poacher’s muttering gun.

The ploughman hears its humming rage begin,
And hies for shelter from his naked toil;
Buttoning his doublet closer to his chin,
He bends and scampers o’er the elting soil,
While clouds above him in wild fury boil,
And winds drive heavily the beating rain;
He turns his back to catch his breath awhile,
Then ekes his speed and faces it again,
To seek the shepherd’s hut beside the rushy plain.

The boy, that scareth from the spiry wheat
The melancholy crow – in hurry weaves,
Beneath an ivied tree, his sheltering seat,
Of rushy flags and sedges tied in sheaves,
Or from the field a shock of stubble thieves.
There he doth dithering sit, and entertain
His eyes with marking the storm-driven leaves;
Oft spying nests where he spring eggs had ta’en,
And wishing in his heart twas summer-time again.

Thus wears the month along, in checker’d moods,
Sunshine and shadows, tempests loud, and calms;
One hour dies silent o’er the sleepy woods,
The next wakes loud with unexpected storms;
A dreary nakedness the field deforms –
Yet many a rural sound, and rural sight,
Lives in the village still about the farms,
Where toil’s rude uproar hums from morn till night
Noises, in which the ears of Industry delight.

At length the stir of rural labour’s still,
And Industry her care awhile foregoes;
When Winter comes in earnest to fulfil
His yearly task, at bleak November’s close,
And stops the plough, and hides the field in snows;
When frost locks up the stream in chill delay,
And mellows on the hedge the jetty sloes,
For little birds – then Toil hath time for play,
And nought but threshers’ flails awake the dreary day.

 

John Clare 

 

A time-travel poem for those of us a bit weary of the present.

Beholding the Hare

Yvonne Carroll

Beholding the Hare

In the gale that's trying to take the roof off this small house,
shaking it to it's rocky foundations, the hare is making
his rounds of the garden. Wet morning light shows me his ears
hemmed in white, their black points, how they flatten
when the wind roars, rise and swivel when he hunkers under
the shelter of hedges or against the drenched stones of the wall.

All he knows is the way the weather is, how it wraps him up
in its fits and starts, a sort of swirling whirligod whose breath
he must, turn and turn about, huddle from or bask in. Now
he stretches to get at a dark green left-over bramble leaf, all else
bare as sea-beaten stone and showing to the wind and rain
its skin and bone -- tree-bark bright as those black-currant eyes

that read the world like a book, each page changing the story
no matter what we or the hare or that one ruffled chaffinch
balancing between red and yellow pegs on the clothesline
can make of it. Right now what I'm struck by is the creature's 
articulate singularity, the way he is all of a piece, every particle
precisely in the present moment, from the inked tip of each ear

to the chalk-tuft under his raised tail, from the fur-coated ripple
that is his muscle when he tenses a haunch, to the delicate tremor
his nose makes as it fetches the rest of the world into the realm
of his understanding, that many-scented evanescence in the wind
of things, what his eye can't find, nor his tongue touch, nor the
soft fingers of his fur make any sense of, nor his quick ears

swivelling to every whisper -- but which the snub shiverbutton
of his nose (colour of tree-bark) finds, filling out his feeling
for the world, any minute of which would take me an age of
translation to carry over even a glimmer, knowing no words
for his wholeness, for all the stuff of sense registering at once
on the shell of him, how he's the kernel of its kinetic wheeling

by just being there, free of memory and forecast, being at one
with possibility like that, and not at odds, not split in the middle
and out of focus, not feeling the very ground itself veined
with turbulence, fault lines branching every which way from
the lost centre, the heart itself out of tune, unable to contain it-
self. Not, that is, one of us: soul-searching in our skin of reason.

Eamon Grennan

(The wind really is trying to take the roof off the house, as it happens.) After Dylan Thomas's sweeping love and death lyric, we need a change, something individual and specific. Pablo Neruda and his Odes have given me a taste for the Spotlight Poem, the poem with one focus. It amazes me how honing in inevitably leads outward. This poem does that in a sort of regretful way, the speaker seeming to envy the "wholeness" of the hare in comparison to our human condition of split-awareness and inner imbalance. And his description of the hare - "all of a piece, every particle precisely in the present moment" - doesn't that line capture exactly how a small animal freezes in mid-action when it senses danger? And - "the snub shiverbutton of his nose" - the perfect words to bring the hare wholly alive before our eyes. 




 

Encounter

Maggie Vandewalle

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

 Czeslaw Milosz

Oh this poem - this poem captures the shocked incredulity we feel that a moment and movement and person so alive, so vivid in memory could be gone. Where are they? Where do they go? How could they simply "not be"? It is beyond comprehension. A mystery we go over and over.