November; the frosted magic of the night
had softly stepped away;
and the sword-edged beauty of the morning,
unsheathed,
rang out like crystal;
a sparkling wine flooded
the thin glass of the world
and glistened gently on the brimmed horizons.
The seagulls wheeled
and stacked themselves against the sun,
only to slip and scatter
down the dazzling air;
clowning plovers whooped and tumbled,
newborn... And then
we found the hedgerow.
Rich and complicated,
somehow sturdily there, unapologetic in a morning of
transparency,
it stood
deep-rooted in the flood-plain of the past;
the front line now...holding on, beleaguered, under threat.
Its smiling, tawny face accepted still a blessing from the
sun
but deep behind its shadowed eyes
lay darkened mysteries of time long past,
those tangled sorrows of accepted pain, of death;
some pools of hope there were, quiet,
held in rush and bugloss,
haunted by the flickering wren.
The line still held, shoulder to shoulder,
ash and cherry, oak and thorn,
burning, bright;
so many stood, calm, high-couraged;
the spindle berries starred the shielding sky
and hurled a cool defiance
at the closing wire,
the strangling, barbed advance.
And the leaves fell sudden, sad,
shrouding every empty fox hole....
At the rising of the sun
and at the going down of the same
we shall remember
all of this.
(for
Delia)
(Undated. November 1985?)
