A poem for today

I know that poem well - it is so evocative and says so much. I love it.

Someone sent me a poem last year when I had dreadful empty nest syndrome even though she says she wishes she could have the chance to experience it herself, as hers show no sign of clearing off.

Walking Away, by C Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

My mum and Dad would often take my brother and I on picnics and we alway seemed to be by streams - very happy childhood memories. Then, at school, we learned this poem which always brings back those childhood memories. I have it hanging on my wall at home:

The Brook

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern, to bicker down a valley.
By thirty hills I hurry down, or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town, and half a hundred bridges.
Till last by Philip's farm I flow to join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

I chatter over stony ways, in little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles.
With many a curve my banks I fret by many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set with willow-weed and mallow.
I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

I wind about, and in and out, with here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout, and here and there a grayling.
And here and there a foamy flake upon me as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak above the golden gravel.
And draw them all along, and flow to join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots that grow for happy lovers.
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeams dance against my sandy shallows.
I murmer under moon and stars in brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars; I loiter round my cresses.
And out again I curve and flow to join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

(Lord Tennyson)

Soppy old so and so

That is a beautiful poem Mishap.

Many thanks for starting the thread jingle - I quite like poetry

Hollydaze that one made me well up a bit. I don't do welling up! I think it made me think of my grandsons

It always brings a lump to my throat too jinglbellsfrocks It's part of what we do as parents.

I also worked with children from ages of 6 years to 16 years for around 20 years and in part of my training for both Scouts and Youth Work, I used that poem to explain why I did what I did; it has a very special meaning for me and I'm pleased it touched you too.

janerowena - I love the Sheenagh Pugh - someone sent it to me when my life was tough - I really appreciated it.

Here's another by Carol Ann Duffy and it is gentler and kinder than most of hers:

CAROL A N N DUFFY

A Child's Sleep

I stood at the edge of my child's sleep
hearing her breathe;
although I could not enter there,
I could not leave.
Her sleep was a small wood,
perfumed with flowers;
dark, peaceful, sacred,
acred in hours.

And she was the spirit that lives
in the heart of such woods;
without time, without history,
wordlessly good.
I spoke her name, a pebble dropped
in the still night,
and saw her stir, both open palms
cupping their soft light;
then went to the window. The greater dark
outside the room
gazed back, maternal, wise,
with its face of moon.

I love the phrase "acred in hours" - it says so much and is a perfect reflection of a child sleeping.

Love that one merlot! I shall save it with my collection of favourites.

Hollydaze that one made me well up a bit. I don't do welling up!

I think it made me think of my grandsons, and the world they will have to carry on their lives in.

I think I might have posted on the wrong thread somewhere on here. I can't see where my remark would fit in. Sorry.

I did this for DH on our 45th Anniversary last year.

Some people make a fuss of anniversaries over forty
They try to play the whole thing down and act all stiff and haughty

Some people try and try in vain to block the path of time
With energetic hobbies just to keep them in their prime

Those people need to be like us - two spirits brave and bold
Who face up to the honest truth we're getting bloody old!!

Fortunately he agreed with me.

THE BRIDGE BUILDER

An old man, going a lone highway,
Came at the evening cold and grey,
To a chasm, vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim-
That sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when he reached the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.

"Old man," said a fellow pilgrim near,
"You are wasting strength in building here.
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way.
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?"

The builder lifted his old grey head.
"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,
"There followeth after me today
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him."

(Will Allen Dromgoole)

Maybe if more people felt that way, the world would be a kinder place for everyone.

The Obligation to Be Happy
By Linda Pastan

It is more onerous

than the rites of beauty

or housework, harder than love.

But you expect it of me casually,

the way you expect the sun

to come up, not in spite of rain

or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity

to sadness were a hidden vice—

that downward tug on my mouth,

my old suspicion that health

and love are brief irrelevancies,

no more than laughter in the warm dark

strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it

on my narrow shoulders again—

a knapsack heavy with gold coins.

I stumble around the house,

bump into things.

Only Midas himself

would understand.

I think HQ get a bit over-precious with this site.

Me that is.

Oh, get back to nice pomes for God's sake!

#miseryguts

Yes. So far.

Indeed. I thought that was what you were thinking of, actually. It is heart-breaking. For all its faults, we are very lucky to live in the UK.

Sorry to sound "high minded".

Tbh, when I posted that poem I was thinking of those poor kids, on both sides, Arabs and Jews, murdered for no good reason at all in the middle east. Not there can be a good reason for murder.

A mutilated world indeed.

I like the first verse.

A beautiful spring or summer's day always brings this to mind:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

– e.e. cummings

jingle

Actually, he's lucky to get a card.

Eurgh!! I couldn't put any of that stuff (Gaga's link) in a card to my old feller. He's lucky to get 'love from' and a couple of kisses.

If love was like a river
Flowing out to sea
Then my love would reach you
No matter where you be

If love was like a springtime flower
Each year forming new
Then that is how my love grows
Each time I look at you

If love was like a mountain
Climbing to the sky
Then no-one else in all this world
Could love you more than I.

I wrote that for my children when they were little