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The Monday Poem (old)
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'Miracle on St David's Day' by Gillian Clarke (3rd March 2014)
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I've added the Monday poem a few days early this week, so that it is here for St David's Day, March 1st. This is the National Day in Wales.Gillian Clarke is the National Poet of Wales.
Sad yet uplifting at the same time. I'll have to add Clarke to my ever-expanding TBR!Thanks Gill :)
Ouch. Painfully beautiful. Thank you for posting this Gill!
I liked the poem and loved the last stanza. Thanks for sharing.
I've been reading her poems for many years, since I first read 'Letter from a far country.' It's a long poem (fifteen pages in my book) about, well actually about everything! :life in a Welsh village now the mills have gone, men, women, nature, history, memory, continuity, change etc etc. I think it's brilliant and it would run Heaney, Yeats and Frost close (and maybe win!) if I had to choose a desert island poem.
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How beautiful, thank you for sharing this poem, and the link.
Heart-breaking. I need to read more of her poetry.Diolch yn fawr for sharing this.
Wonderfully visual. Need to read more of her poetry, I loved this one though I too found it heartbreaking.
'They flash upon that inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude'
(from 'The Daffodils' by William Wordsworth)
An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed
with daffodils. The sun treads the path
among cedars and enormous oaks.
It might be a country house, guests strolling,
the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.
I am reading poetry to the insane.
An old woman, interrupting, offers
as many buckets of coal as I need.
A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens
entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic
on a good day, they tell me later.
In a cage of first March sun a woman
sits not listening, not feeling.
In her neat clothes the woman is absent.
A big, mild man is tenderly led
to his chair. He has never spoken.
His labourer's hands on his knees, he rocks
gently to the rhythms of the poems.
I read to their presences, absences,
to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.
He is suddenly standing, silently,
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow
movement of spring water or the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer's voice recites 'The Daffodils'.
The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients
seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect.
Outside the daffodils are still as wax,
a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables
unspoken, their creams and yellows still.
Forty years ago, in a Valleys school,
the class recited poetry by rote.
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.
When he's done, before the applause, we observe
the flowers' silence. A thrush sings
and the daffodils are flame.