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| Diana Ashdown. |
Listen
Listen, I have flown through darkness towards joy,
I have put the mossy stones away from me,
and the thorns, the thistles, the brambles.
I have swum upward like a fish
through the black wet earth, the ancient roots
which insanely fight with each other
in a grave which creates a treasure house
of light upward-springing leaves.
Such joy, such joy! Such airy drama
the clouds compose in the heavens,
such interchange of comedies,
disguises, rhymes, denouements.
I had not believed that the stony heads
would change to actors and actresses,
and that the grooved armour of statues
would rise and walk away
into a resurrection of villages,
townspeople, citizens, dead exiles,
who sing with the salt in their mouths,
winged nightingales of brine.
Iain Crichton Smith
This
is one of those poems like “The Conflict” by C.Day Lewis, or “Thalassa” by
Louis MacNeice and several others that I’ve posted, in which the speaker
clearly sees the difficulty and struggle in their circumstances and nonetheless
chooses to work toward hope. The poem talks about swimming upward through the
soil like a fish, but I have this picture in my mind of a seed sprout pushing its
way toward the surface as well. The images are wonderful – the statues walking,
the “resurrection of villages” – and the description of life as such an “interchange
of comedies, disguises, rhymes, denouements”, so true. Can we too, fly
birdlike, swim fishlike, (or reach flower or treelike) toward joy, toward light
and hope? Is it possible to believe that the darkness is where we start? That this
is where joy is rooted?
