Yesterday …tomorrow
Today was to-morrow yesterday
What does a day weigh in the scales of time
(Or a word in a rhyme)?
Do empty days weigh less
(Or words unheard)?
Every day is made of twenty-four hours:
Are some hours weightier than others
And have they greater powers
(Are some words freighted)?
The days behind and the days before
Are they less or more according to count?
Midnight takes today from the pan of the future
And puts it into the pan of the past –
Does the balance alter the same amount
For every day paid
(And every word said)?
And can to-day borrow
An hour from tomorrow or yesterday
Today will be yesterday tomorrow.
You Forget
You forget so easily,
and I remember with such pain …
Across the half tones of my life
your love is splashed, a crimson stain.
(How can I love in lavender when I have loved in scarlet?)
It should be soiled with much remembering.
It has been washed so often in my tears
it should be faded now, but it flames
in bold relief against the pastel years,
and all the lovely quiet shades
in which my days and weeks are done
look pale and colourless beside
the vivid patch your love has spun …
(I cannot love in lavender when I have loved in scarlet!)
And how can I forget
when with so deep a dye your love is set?
But you – your life is wrought like this
of brilliant colour and delight,
and in your days of gold and flame
one crimson thread is lost to sight,
and you forget. I know … I know.
Only with me it is not so.
“You Never Enjoy The World”
(Said Thomas Traherne)
“You never enjoy the world aright, “he said,
“Until the sea itself flows in your veins,
Until you are clothed with heavens and crowned with
The stars;
Until you perceive yourself to be sole heir
Of all the world and even more than so,
Since men are in it everyone sole heirs
As well as you and part of the same affairs.
Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God,
As misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres,
And birds in air, you never enjoy the world.”
You Who Speak the Language Will Understand
You who speak the language will understand,
The earth on your feet, the eagle in your eye:
You will know what it is to race through the sky
With the scudding clouds, to drink with the thirsty land,
To surge with the sea, to slip with the yielding sand,
To mount a star and watch the world go by,
Undeterred by time or space, to fly;
Conscious of the Hand within your hand.
You who feel the consummate inter-relation
Of all that is and all that are, will know
Beyond the need of other proof the glow
Of being and the exquisite elation
And despair and livingness that go
With the delight and colour of creation.
Airlie Close
Constantia C.P.
You Would Have Loved This Day
You would have loved this day, with the low wind flying
Over the eager hills, laughing, crying;
Blowing the reeds by the river, pushing, tussling
With truculent branches of head-high bracken, hustling
Down through the valley, rollicking over the hill,
Creaking the lazy limbs of the groaning mill;
Whipping the trees to rage – how you would thrill
To the pace of the race as the mad wind gallops on!
But what does it matter, now that you are gone?
You
Do not expect me to believe, my friend,
This fragile form could hope to hold the whole
Of you, or its cessation mark the end
Of your distinctive – shall we call it soul
For lack of a more concise, definable word –
The quality that makes you only You
And no one else; the constant note I heard
When first we met and recognised as true.
This blood and bone could never hope to hold
The sum of all the things you do and know
And think and are, that pause and shape and mould
The instrument through which you come and go.
The captive You behind this form and face
Has contact with the vastness of space.
Airlie Close
Constantia C.P.
Young Plum Tree in Blossom
A maiden going to her first communion
Under blue Spring skies,
All clad in white
With dreams still in her eyes,
Fragile dreams
The summer will not prize…
Alas, that blossoms fall too soon,
That dreams materialise.
“Veritas”
Constantia, C.P.