05-19-2017, 07:27 AM
The first world, sorrow of autumn love
turns slow streetlight color,
turns suddenly goodbye.
The rat's tail garden, so long in the evening
splits through brown poppy pods,
nine morning laburnum heads,
Arctic still, and it cannot go.
Black sorrow with its circle of grasses
torn from second babies’ silk hair
holds empty green feet in the air;
soft hook of brother pheasants
hanging delectable.
Gold woodland cushions have lovingly folded
my head in a bag
like the is of feathers.
I think the third flushed sorrow may warm
this slow, enormous goodbye
like a stupidly happy sun, so birds gather
and gather at my Wellingtons
as red evening minutes squelch through
beautiful pictures, golden holy ground.
Two times today my sorry property
has gone forth to the black pond.
I sink to the ruins, sniff water,
pace the palace, the beetle city,
barbarous viridian catacombs of
iron dragonflies, pure scallops of holly.
Slow sorrow and walled goodbyes;
odd how I love them,
fifth woodland of quiet histories
breaking camp like apples, imagine that -
one day litter, next day golden firewood.
think of left tentpoles
seventy-six tree foxes
holding ruddy gold balls of sorrow,
thick huntsmen, gray hounds
in death-of-joy soup,
a million pounding metal hooves
on earth’s ear, closed to gold leaves
and fox’s breathless prayer.
Nobody but my irreplaceable celibate love
and the tatty fairground children
bleed sorrow through the gold window,
slow, waist-high as the seventh wrinkle deepens
and the year packs wet goodbyes
into the mouths of Thermopylae.
(I used Ted Hughe's poem 'The Seven Sorrows' melded with the lines of Sylvia Plath's poem 'Letter in November' to create this ‘Cento’ or 'found' poem. Published in poetryrepairs.com)