POEMS

MONT ST. HILAIRE

(for Angela)

 

Muffled angelus through this white town

Sounds the hour of sunset down —

The moon slides slowly out to print the trees

On their books of snow.

Orchards

Of silence, sad silent orchestras

Of branch and bole. (Ripe apples sang

My fall away but now they oaken lie

Cellared for some other Adam.) Mute

Are the tongues of wood, the lilting

Tongues those bells of apples tolled in a branching sky

Long since gone by.

We snowshoed that Sunday, striding

The tree lanes down; and you laughed

To tears my fall, your white mittens

Tiny as mice in your sleighing coat.

Why aren’t there symphonies, you asked,

For me to dance? Your thoughts

Crowding the wings to pirouette their joy

For my mind’s yearning audience.

 

But now the apples lurk

In frozen sap; the symphonies are scores

On sheeted snow. Silent our sins

Were unplucked and unknown are festivals

Of fruit and kisses. White as earliest Eve

And orchard snow you dance to other lustres

Than my moon. The choral blossoms throb in roots of ice.

 

Paul Almond February 1954

 

 

THE SOLDIER

 

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home

 

Rupert Brooke