Slivers of Gold
POETRY: From winter’s depths, inching to spring
Ice-flecked,
in your snow-white gown.
Down, down low.
Down you go.
Submerged
in the flow of the stink-river,
sluggish and slow.
Black-sparked, the fire-smoke
pricks tears in your eyes, as
your ears hear the buzzing of
poison-cloud flies.
You know that you’re falling,
you’re scrabbling and sprawling.
Resilience gone.
Hold on.
In you, my lovely, my darling, my one,
are elusive and slippery slivers of gold.
Remote, untouched
hammer-beaten and so frozen-cold.
Yet they’re weighty, yet bold.
Reach down!
Take hold!
Let your fingertips fold and
your palms cup these drowned
and shimmering traces,
these scraps, interlacery
scattered on battlegrounds.
The glittering relics of your soul.
Reborn and empowered,
rise free from your bonds.
The dawn light is kissing
your frail new growth’s fronds.
Step up, out, sure-footed,
a sunflower in sun.
You’re emerging from darkness.
Your new day has come.
THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING is an engine of poetry. We come blinking into the watery morning sunlight and the clichés flock into the air: the bursting buds, the trembling flower-heads rising like children, the theatrical clouds, symphonies of birdsong, the baptismal rain, the palette shifting to goldenrod and moss, and the heavy recycling of words like petrichor.
But what can one do? The theme is a well-worn cycle, and I don’t see the seasons’ change as malign, so a cheery welcome is what it gets – helped along by the hopeful chirping of a blackbird in the woodland by my window, and the heavy scrabble of a pheasant, dumb as a fencepost, wondering why he is on the roof now.
So: embrace the cliché, and try to keep it fresh. My poem here is a spring-time picture in a very familiar frame: an awakening from winter, re-birth, a season of healing and new life. I hope its main energy is not lost; that it is about depression encouraged by the elusive sun, and finding an escape in the pull of brighter things.
Come May, we can look forward to the next seasons’ over-worked figures of speech. Summer’s fluttering butterflies, parched earth, languid rivers. Then autumn. Oh God, the leaves, the leaves, gold, red, tumbling, tumbling…
You made it to the end! 🙂
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Photo: “Our Lily” montaged to panoramic ratio by me, from an original photo by Dr. B. Kröhn, Prague, published in Lilliput Pocket Omnibus, 1937–1938. (Deep-cut Cocteau Twins fans might recognise the image from the cover of their 1982 EP, Lullabies.)
This is lovely. I wish I could hear it read aloud by Cate Blanchett.