Tuesday - er, Wednesday poem
Apr. 7th, 2010 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labellementeuseSo I wasn't feeling it yesterday poemwise and today I still don't have personal inspiration. Here's an Anne French poem herself, or actually (since it's a very long poem) part of a poem. This is from her book Wild, and I often - being a Wellingtonian - find myself thinking of her last couplet as I walk.
I: In Petts Wood (from Seeking the wild)
Woodhurst Avenue, Nightingale Road,
Lakewood Road, Haslemere, Birchwood,
Woodland Way, Greencourt, Westholm,
Riverwood, Pine Road, Wood Ride-
as though you all lived in the forest still,
not in this sylvan grove of tiled semis,
as though Petts Wood were in a clearing
and Grendel could storm in at ay time,
as though Sir Gawain rides still:
Into a forest ful depe, that ferly was wilde,
High hilles on uche a half, and holtwoods under,
Of hore okes ful huge a hundred togeder;
The hasel and the haghthorne were harled al samen
With rugh ragged mosse railed aywhere
And so I go by way of Crestview, Tent Peg Lane,
and Thornet Wood, across three bridges
and seven sets of tracks, across Great Thrift
to the top of Petts Wood and St Paul's Cray
Common, across the A208 and into Park Wood
in seach of wildness and the ancient forest.
But find dozens of dogs walking their people;
and a Cornishman with curly hair and a lurcher,
wearing moleskin trousers, mending a fence,
who recommends tyhat I try Cornwall or Wales -
and a flock of sheep grazing
in a field on Hawkwood Estate where no one
may set foot; and a sequence of molehills;
with London a distant haze, and all the houses
and roads and railway lines dropped out of sight,
with wooded hills as far as the eye can see
through the thickening morning air.
O, let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!
But the people out walking avert their gaze
and stare sightlessly to one side or the other
like polar bears in the zoo on hot Saturdays,
rocking from side to side, longing for
impossible ice, and white-green distance,
trying to make the crowds disappear
in the sun's dazzle, and their cries and chatter
turn into seals barking and the creaking of ice.
I am a foreigner here in my father's country.
I know the true meaning of wind, mountain, wild.
-- Anne French
I: In Petts Wood (from Seeking the wild)
Woodhurst Avenue, Nightingale Road,
Lakewood Road, Haslemere, Birchwood,
Woodland Way, Greencourt, Westholm,
Riverwood, Pine Road, Wood Ride-
as though you all lived in the forest still,
not in this sylvan grove of tiled semis,
as though Petts Wood were in a clearing
and Grendel could storm in at ay time,
as though Sir Gawain rides still:
Into a forest ful depe, that ferly was wilde,
High hilles on uche a half, and holtwoods under,
Of hore okes ful huge a hundred togeder;
The hasel and the haghthorne were harled al samen
With rugh ragged mosse railed aywhere
And so I go by way of Crestview, Tent Peg Lane,
and Thornet Wood, across three bridges
and seven sets of tracks, across Great Thrift
to the top of Petts Wood and St Paul's Cray
Common, across the A208 and into Park Wood
in seach of wildness and the ancient forest.
But find dozens of dogs walking their people;
and a Cornishman with curly hair and a lurcher,
wearing moleskin trousers, mending a fence,
who recommends tyhat I try Cornwall or Wales -
and a flock of sheep grazing
in a field on Hawkwood Estate where no one
may set foot; and a sequence of molehills;
with London a distant haze, and all the houses
and roads and railway lines dropped out of sight,
with wooded hills as far as the eye can see
through the thickening morning air.
O, let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!
But the people out walking avert their gaze
and stare sightlessly to one side or the other
like polar bears in the zoo on hot Saturdays,
rocking from side to side, longing for
impossible ice, and white-green distance,
trying to make the crowds disappear
in the sun's dazzle, and their cries and chatter
turn into seals barking and the creaking of ice.
I am a foreigner here in my father's country.
I know the true meaning of wind, mountain, wild.
-- Anne French
