An atmospheric March poem from poet-cleric Andrew Young, showing his customary feeling for nature and the originality of his response to it. The piece comes from his Selected Poems (Carcanet, £9.95).
THE VENTRILOQUISTS
The birds sang in the rain
That rhythmically waving its grey veil
From smoking hilltop flowed to misty plain,
Where one white house shone sharply as a sail;
~
But not so bright as these,
The anemones that held the wood snow-bound,
The water-drops waiting to fall from trees,
The rusty catkins crawling on the ground.
~
March buds give little shelter;
Better seek shelter in the open rain
Than where tree-gathered showers fall helter-skelter,
I meditated; but ‘Turn, turn again’,
~
The birds shrieked through their song;
So rooted to the leaf-soft earth I stood,
Letting my restless eye wander among
The thick sky-crawling branches of the wood.
~
But no bird could I see
In criss-cross of thin twigs or sudden twists
Where branching tree interrupted branching tree;
Yet everywhere those hidden ventriloquists
~
Were singing in the wood,
Flinging their cheating voices here and there;
But seeing nothing though I walked or stood
I thought the singing grew out of the air.
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