Laurie Lee Selected Poems Read online

  There is hunger in the mouth

  of vole and badger,

  silver agonies of breath

  in the nostril of the fox,

  ice on the rabbit’s paw.

  Tonight has no moon,

  no food for the pilgrim;

  the fruit tree is bare,

  the rose bush a thorn

  and the ground bitter with stones.

  But the mole sleeps, and the hedgehog

  lies curled in a womb of leaves,

  the bean and the wheat-seed

  hug their germs in the earth

  and the stream moves under the ice.

  Tonight there is no moon,

  but a new star opens

  like a silver trumpet over the dead.

  Tonight in a nest of ruins

  the blessèd babe is laid.

  And the fir tree warms to a bloom of candles,

  the child lights his lantern,

  stares at his tinselled toy;

  our hearts and hearths

  smoulder with live ashes.

  In the blood of our grief

  the cold earth is suckled,

  in our agony the womb

  convulses its seed,

  in the last cry of anguish

  the child’s first breath is born.

  Poem for Easter

  Wrapped in his shroud of wax, his swoon of wounds,

  still as a winter’s star he lies with death.

  Still as a winter’s lake his stark limbs lock

  the pains that run in stabbing frosts around him.

  Star in the lake, grey spark beneath the ice,

  candle of love snuffed in its whitened flesh.

  I, too, lie bound within your dawn of cold

  while on my breath the serpent mortal moans.

  O serpent in the egg, become a rod,

  crack the stone shell that holds his light in coil.

  O grief within the serpent sink your root

  and bear the flower for which our forked tongues wail.

  Cold in their hope our mortal eyes forgather,

  wandering like moths about the tomb’s shut mouth;

  Waiting the word the riven rock shall utter,

  waiting the dawn to fly its bird of god.

  April Rise

  If ever I saw blessing in the air

  I see it now in this still early day

  Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips

  Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

  Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round

  Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod

  Splutters with soapy green, and all the world

  Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.

  If ever I heard blessing it is there

  Where birds in trees that shoals and shadows are

  Splash with their hidden wings and drops of sound

  Break on my ears their crests of throbbing air.

  Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates,

  The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,

  While white as water by the lake a girl

  Swims her green hand among the gathered swans.

  Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,

  Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;

  Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,

  If ever world were blessèd, now it is.

  First Love

  That was her beginning, an apparition

  of rose in the unbreathed airs of his love,

  her heart revealed by the wash of summer

  sprung from her childhood’s shallow stream.

  Then it was that she put up her hair,

  inscribed her eyes with a look of grief,

  while her limbs grew as curious as coral branches,

  her breast full of secrets.

  But the boy, confused in his day’s desire,

  was searching for herons, his fingers bathed

  in the green of walnuts, or watching at night

  the Great Bear spin from the maypole star.

  It was then that he paused in the death of a game,

  felt the hook of her hair on his swimming throat,

  saw her mouth at large in the dark river

  flushed like a salmon.

  But he covered his face and hid his joy

  in a wild-goose web of false directions,

  and hunted the woods for eggs and glow-worms,

  for rabbits tasteless as moss.

  And she walked in fields where the crocuses

  branded her feet, and mares’ tails sprang

  from the prancing lake, and the salty grasses

  surged round her stranded body.

  The Long War

  Less passionate the long war throws

  its burning thorn about all men,

  caught in one grief, we share one wound,

  and cry one dialect of pain.

  We have forgot who fired the house,

  whose easy mischief spilt first blood,

  under one raging roof we lie

  the fault no longer understood.

  But as our twisted arms embrace

  the desert where our cities stood,

  death’s family likeness in each face

  must show, at last, our brotherhood.

  Moss-Rose

  My mother would grow roses with each hand,

  drawing them forth from country-frothing air.

  Draw them, shape them, cut them from the thorn;

  lay them like bleeding shells about the house.

  And with my ears to the lips of those shell-roses

  I harked to their humming seas, secret as hives.

  And with my lips to those same rose-shell ears

  I spoke my crimson words, my stinging brain.

  With lips, ears, eyes, and every finger’s nerve,

  I moved, moth-throbbing, round each creviced fire.

  As I do now, lost mother, country gone,

  groping my grief around your moss-rose heart.

  Bird

  O bird that was my vision,

  my love, my dream that flew

  over the famine-folded rocks,

  the sky’s reflected snow.

  O bird that found and fashioned me,

  that brought me from the land

  safe in her singing cage of bone,

  the webbed wings of her hand.

  She took me to the topmost air,

  curled in the atom of her eye,

  and there I saw an island rise

  out of the empty sea.

  And falling there she set me down

  naked on soil that knew no plough,

  and loveless, speechless, I beheld

  the world’s beginning grow.

  And there I slew her for my bread

  and in her feathers dressed;

  and there I raised a paradise

  from the seed in her dead breast.

  Black Edge

  I lie no more in a healthy sheet,

  a wind of chill eyes makes a marsh of my cheeks,

  diseased is my sleep with demented sound

  and I am infected by the stars.

  For see how the sun rubs ulcers in the sky,

  how black as bats the field flowers droop and fall;

  the earth, the sweet earth

  is foul and full of graves.

  O save me, for I am sick:

  lay on my eyelids your finger’s mirac
le,

  bewitch me that I may live.

  Wash me in happy air,

  restore me with the odour of rivers;

  then feed, O feed

  my sight with your normal love.

  Thistle

  Thistle, blue bunch of daggers

  rattling upon the wind,

  saw-tooth that separates

  the lips of grasses.

  Your wound in childhood was

  a savage shock of joy

  that set the bees on fire

  and the loud larks singing.

  Your head enchanted then

  smouldering among the flowers

  filled the whole sky with smoke

  and sparks of seed.

  Now from your stabbing bloom’s

  nostalgic point of pain

  ghosts of those summers rise

  rustling across my eyes.

  Seeding a magic thorn

  to prick the memory,

  to start in my icy flesh

  fevers of long lost fields.

  My Many-Coated Man

  Under the scarlet-licking leaves,

  through bloody thought and bubbly shade,

  the padded, spicy tiger moves –

  a sheath of swords, a hooded blade.

  The turtle on the naked sand

  peels to the air his pewter snout

  and rubs the sky with slotted shell –

  the heart’s dismay turned inside out.

  The rank red fox goes forth at night

  to bite the gosling’s downy throat,

  then digs his grave with panic claws

  to share oblivion with the stoat.

  The mottled moth, pinned to a tree,

  woos with his wings the bark’s disease

  and strikes a fungoid, fevered pose

  to live forgotten and at ease.

  Like these, my many-coated man

  shields his hot hunger from the wind,

  and, hooded by a smile, commits

  his private murder in the mind.

  Summer Rain

  Where in the valley the summer rain

  Moves crazed and chill through the crooked trees

  The briars bleed green, and the far fox-banks

  Their sharp cries tangle in sobbing shades.

  I hear the sad rinsing of reeded meadows

  The small lakes rise in the wild white rose

  The shudder of wings in the streaming cedars

  And tears of lime running down from the hills.

  All day in the tomb of my brain I hear

  The cold wheat whisper, the veiled trees mourn,

  And behold through windows of weighted ivy

  The wet walls blossom with silver snails.

  The heron flies up from the stinging waters,

  The white swan droops by the dripping reed,

  And summer lies swathed in its ripeness, exuding

  Damp odours of lilies and alabaster.

  In a fever of June she is wrapped and anointed

  With deathly sweating of cold jasmine,

  And her petals weep wax to the thick green sky

  Like churchyard wreaths under domes of glass.

  Too long hangs the light in the valley lamenting,

  The slow rain sucking the sun’s green eye;

  And too long do you hide in your vault of clay

  While I search for your passion’s obliterate stone.

  Let the dark night come, let it crack of doom

  The sky’s heart shatter and empty grief,

  The storm fetch its thunder of hammers and axes,

  The green hills break as our graves embrace.

  Field of Autumn

  Slow moves the acid breath of noon

  over the copper-coated hill,

  slow from the wild crab’s bearded breast

  the palsied apples fall.

  Like coloured smoke the day hangs fire,

  taking the village without sound;

  the vulture-headed sun lies low

  chained to the violet ground.

  The horse upon the rocky height

  rolls all the valley in his eye,

  but dares not raise his foot or move

  his shoulder from the fly.

  The sheep, snail-backed against the wall.

  lifts her blind face but does not know

  the cry her blackened tongue gives forth

  is the first bleat of snow.

  Each bird and stone, each roof and well,

  feels the gold foot of autumn pass;

  each spider binds with glittering snare

  the splintered bones of grass.

  Slow moves the hour that sucks our life,

  slow drops the late wasp from the pear,

  the rose tree’s thread of scent draws thin -

  and snaps upon the air.

  Day of these Days

  Such a morning it is when love

  leans through geranium windows

  and calls with a cockerel’s tongue.

  When red-haired girls scamper like roses

  over the rain-green grass,

  and the sun drips honey.

  When hedgerows grow venerable,

  berries dry black as blood,

  and holes suck in their bees.

  Such a morning it is when mice

  run whispering from the church,

  dragging dropped ears of harvest.

  When the partridge draws back his spring

  and shoots like a buzzing arrow

  over grained and mahogany fields.

  When no table is bare,

  and no breast dry,

  and the tramp feeds off ribs of rabbit.

  Such a day it is when time

  piles up the hills like pumpkins,

  and the streams run golden.

  When all men smell good,

  and the cheeks of girls

  are as baked bread to the mouth.

  As bread and bean flowers

  the touch of their lips

  and their white teeth sweeter than cucumbers.

  Boy in Ice

  O river, green and still,

  By frost and memory stayed,

  Your dumb and stiffened glass divides

  A shadow and a shade.

  In air, the shadow’s face

  My winter gaze lets fall

  To see beneath the stream’s bright bars

  That other shade in thrall.

  A boy, time-fixed in ice,

  His cheeks with summer dyed,

  His mouth, a rose-devouring rose,

  His bird-throat petrified.

  O fabulous and lost,

  More distant to me now

  Than rock-drawn mammoth, painted stag

  Or tigers in the snow.

  You stare into my face

  Dead as ten thousand years,

  Your sparrow tongue sealed in my mouth

  Your world about my ears.

  And till our shadows meet,

  Till time burns through the ice,

  Thus frozen shall we ever stay

  Locked in this paradise.

  The Edge of Day

  The dawn’s precise pronouncement waits

  With breath of light indrawn,

  Then forms with smoky, smut-red lips

  The great O of the sun.

  The mouldering atoms of the dark

  Blaze into morning air;

  The birdlike
stars droop down and die,

  The starlike birds catch fire.

  The thrush’s tinder throat strikes up,

  The sparrow chips hot sparks

  From flinty tongue, and all the sky

  Showers with electric larks.

  And my huge eye a chaos is

  Where molten worlds are born;

  Where floats the eagle’s flaming moon,

  And crows, like clinkers, burn;

  Where blackbirds scream with comet tails,

  And flaring finches fall,

  And starlings, aimed like meteors,

  Bounce from the garden wall;

  Where, from the edge of day I spring

  Alive for mortal flight,

  Lit by the heart’s exploding sun

  Bursting from night to night.

  Twelfth Night

  No night could be darker than this night,

  no cold so cold,

  as the blood snaps like a wire,

  and the heart’s sap stills,

  and the year seems defeated.

  O never again, it seems, can green things run,

  or sky birds fly,

  or the grass exhale its humming breath

  powdered with pimpernels,

  from this dark lung of winter.

  Yet here are lessons for the final mile

  of pilgrim kings;

  the mile still left when all have reached

  their tether’s end: that mile

  where the Child lies hid.

  For see, beneath the hand, the earth already

  warms and glows;

  for men with shepherd’s eyes there are

  signs in the dark, the turning stars,

  the lamb’s returning time.

  Out of this utter death he’s born again,

  his birth our saviour;

  from terror’s equinox he climbs and grows,

  drawing his finger’s light across our blood -

  the sun of heaven, and the son of god.

  The Easter Green

  Not dross, but dressed with good,

  Is this gold air;

  Not bald nor bare

  But bearded like a god

  Grown old more fair.

  Dazed from the pit I see

  Glazes of holy light

  On day and diamond night;