Two Summer Poems

The theme for today's virtual (e-mail) meeting of Portsmouth Poetry Society is 'Summer Poems'. 

As it happened, I was making a start on the Collected Poems and so aware of these two fairly similar efforts. The first is from a booklet from 1994 and the second from 2006. And since then I've found a third that isn't quite so insect-fixated.

 

Summer 

  

The quick stirring of stalks marks

the cover a reticent

animal has just vanished 

from, whose curious nerves spark 

thrills ahead of its fervent 

instincts. And it's not ambushed. 

 

It leaves its latest bolt-hole 

faintly warm, like the minute 

heat of my tyre-tracks, cooling 

to nothing on the road. All 

afternoon immaculate 

miracles have been playing:

I ride through insects that fizz
and tremble at the strange gift
of flight, that cannot explain
how generous the light is

and all the world's shadows shift
fractionally up the lane.

 

One Last Summer

 

Although this might be one last summer,

one last outrageous blossoming,

it has the epic nonchalance

to pause in a maze of thought:

 

the dusty, nervous sparrows,

helpless in their careful lives,

look askance and struggle

to understand their restlessness

 

whereas, brought forward from the pre-historic,

the dash and gleam of brief insects,

too clever to know anything,

are perfect in their confidence.

 

It might be an unremitting love,

the unthought presto of passing

thrills and their long, heroic habits

flooded with favourable light.