About
these woods
I belong
with the running stream of song
on a gloved-up winter morn
when I take a note as to its measure
or someone stands upon a stick
that snaps
aside my path with heavy foot
and I turn to listen
to the silence
and a man
unhoods a hawk
and sees it soaring to the sun
above the running stream of song
about these woods where I belong
gw2012/
I like the shape to this poem, how the woods are the top and the base.
ReplyDeleteAnd how the poem returns the initial lines at the end in reverse.
Then the rhyme of unhoods and woods, the two significant images.
Re Gordon's comment about the shape of this poem, it is keats' Grecian Urn, without the dancing maidens of course, but with the weight of silence and the teasing out of thought. A lovely piece.
ReplyDeleteO Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
Thanks for youtr kind comments, Mairi and Gordon, I got the idea when I was jogging in the woods the other day when the weather was almost springlike and the songbirds were like a stream flowing with their singing, and then yesterday I had the idea of telling the tale from the point of view of an enemy, a hawk. I jotted it down on a piece of paper going to town in the tram. So there you have it.
ReplyDelete