Posts Tagged tumbling
POETIC JUSTICE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on February 15th, 2011
A wishful thinking editor re-spelt
my name with a T and changed a poem’s
final words from ‘a tramp woman nurses
an infant/under a tumbling sky’ to
‘under a trembling sky’. Humbling to find
an editor’s chance(?) choice of epithet
happier than mine own! Mine was truer.
One winter night, I was changing trains at Crewe
and a red faced fellow traveller
sang, “…not her beauty alone. ‘Twas the truth
in her eye made me love the Rose of Tralee”.
His pale wife shivered by their cardboard case.
His breath condensed like the whitest of roses.
DEDHAM VALE REVISITED
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 30th, 2009
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1802
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1828
September touches the Vale like a sigh,
a mellow, fruitful suspiration
edging from green to lemon, agitating
gently the skieyest leaves. The Stour
meanders to a sea of clouds vanishing
over an unimaginable Europe.
Dedham Church, a testament to wool,
focuses an especial scene: Saxon names,
corn marigolds, skylarks and enclosures.
After Napoleon, Peterloo and his wife’s
slow death, another canvas shows the same
landscape. New buildings exploit the river
and the church tower is luminous yet
vulnerable, not focal, to a whorl
of cumulus billowing from beyond
the horizon over dark, distressed elms.
Crouched under the overgrown bank of a lane,
the last you see of the painting, with her tent
and her cooking pot, a tramp woman
nurses a child under the tumbling sky.
Recent Comments