HARVEST AND THE SCHOLAR

Now is the time of the dreaming harvest,
When love walks the quiet garden,
Resting under the apple tree and blessing
All the little miracles. 

Blessing the black berry, dark as night and beautiful.
Blessing the hips and haws, their tiny tongues of fire,
Startling crimson, burning red in the tight green hedgerows.
Blessing the fat yellow apples, ripe upon the tree,
Yellow as the mid-day sun rising. 

The scholar sits in front of love, frayed to the bone with living,
Flayed to the soul with loss and longing,
Lamenting lost harvests when all the years were deserts,
All the days were dust, and the wintered wood of lost hopes trembling,
Made the heart a place where harvest was never going to happen.

Yet love murmured only of love.
Blessing the scholar; blessing this, the fathomless miracle.
Murmuring of tiny joys that once had starred the deserts,
Murmuring of love and small horns of plenty
That once had sprung from the dust of sightless days,
Unseen.  Unknown.  Forgotten.
‘Remember,’ breathed love. ‘Remember.’ 

And, remembering, the scholar took from the hand of love
The wintered wood, now bright with fruit and leaf and blossom,
Bright now with hope and love and passion,
Thanks giving for this living harvest safely gathered in. 

                                                                © 2016 Gwen Grant

 

LOVE’S IMPERATIVE

Nothing can stop love,
It goes through fire and flood and rock,
Through flesh and skin and blood,
Burns through hate and will never stop
Until hate has turned to love.

                             © 2020 Gwen Grant

 

 

    WHISKY KISSES

She was such a neat and tidy person,
Compact and sturdy.
Sensible.
Like a mature somebody.

Some days wearing all one colour,
All blue.  All yellow.
All green.  All red.
No beige.
And sometimes she went complex,
Wearing dots and stripes,
Zigzags and circles.
A rainbow of colour
Lighting up the concrete.

People coped with single colours,
With sequinned sunglasses,
With stripes and dots, circles and zigzags
But absolutely could not get on with
Puffball skirts and false eyelashes,
Lipstick slashes and whisky kisses.

This, they said resentfully,
Was a woman acting out of character.
No-one can put up with that for long,
A concrete turning into an abstract.

Act your age, they demanded.
She just laughed, knowing she was already acting it.
Refusing to be pinned down.
Refusing to be identified.

I am, she said,
A Kandinsky and a Constable.
Get used to it.
                                       ©2020 Gwen Grant

 

    LET THE NIGHT COME

Erase the night,
For who is this that we hear calling?
Only the shadows of our dreams.

They cannot escape,
No freedom for them.
Nothing but starlight and long, dark pavements
They cannot walk upon,
Cannot run down, arms wide,
Faces alight with the memory
Of the half world they live in.

Shadows surely do not have a voice
To whisper words that stop us in our tracks.
Yet they haunt us.
Remain resistant to all that can be done
To chase them away.
To silence those memories of what is forever lost.

Do not forbid them, for when they want,
They turn us from sorrow and melancholy,
From terror and lost tears,
To remembrance  of a love and loveliness
We never want to forget.

Let the night come, then.
Let the shadows of our dreams walk among us,
Knowing they all belong to yesterday
And new days are yet to come.

                              © 2020 Gwen Grant

 

 THIS WAY JOYFUL

Thin bony lads
Whirl the girls
Swinging
In the sunshine,
Dancing
As if being young
Could conquer
Everything.

And we are glad
That
For the moment,
It does.

         © 2020 Gwen Grant