Toad

Olivia Clifton-Bligh

 

 

 

Toad

Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse

Squeeze under the rickety door and sit,

Full of satisfaction in a man’s house?

You clamber towards me on your four corners –

Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.

I love you for being a toad,

For crawling like a Japanese wrestler,

And for not being frightened

I put you in my purse hand not shutting it,

And set you down outside directly under

Every star.

A jewel in your head? Toad,

You’ve put one in mine,

A tiny radiance in a dark place.

Norman McCaig

McCaig does a little like Neruda here, spotlights a toad for us blind ones. Shows us a magic we had forgotten how to see. 

This is the thing about poetry, I need it because I have magic-blindness, I cannot see the world for what it is, I can only see "normal" and "ordinary".

I am under an evil enchantment and poetry is the only way to break the spell. 

If I could see the world the way it really is -

I would think in poetry.

Summer Farm

Henry Mosler

Summer Farm 


Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

Norman McCaig 


“Threaded on time…” A pile of selves. Ha! Interesting. Also the idea of lifting a lid and looking down into the scene. Maybe we should be afraid of where our thoughts might take us! Or maybe we just need more practice at it.