The Roe Deer by Ted Hughes

In the dawn's early light, in the the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

They had happened into my dimension
The moment I was arriving just there.

They planted their 2 or 3 years of secret deerhood
Clear on my snowscreen vision of the abnormal

And hesitated in the all-way disintigration
And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign

That the curtain had blown aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

The deer had come for me.

Then they ducked thru the hedge, and upright they rode their legs

Away downhill over snow-lonely field

Towards tree-dark--finally
Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

Into the boil of big flakes.
The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well.

Revising its dawn inspiration
Back to the ordinary.

© Ted Hughes Feb 1973

Wycombe walk

I walk the Wycombe hills
At close of day
As night draws its curtain of darkness
Cross vales of green
Crouching cottages
Leaking light and life
Silent stables standing
And I pass by

Spectral sheep stop and stare
Startled animals scurry there
Untidily like a fleeting thought
Just cant catch it

Black cows heads bowed
dark thoughts unmowed
and tree and bush and here
close in
walk faster, faster, faster
Light, life and longing
to be there

© mjcooke 2009

Do not Stand at My Grave and Weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain

When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight
I am the soft stars that shine at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there. I did not die.

Anon

The Trees by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said
The recent buds relax and spread
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In full grown thickness every May
Last year is dead, they seem to say
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh

(c) Philip Larkin 1967

The Shield of Achilles by WH Auden (Part 1)

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

Solitude - by today's guest poet

Alone I stand beside the chilling lakes,
Dressed in my Oxfam clothes,
With my old ash stick to support my aches,
Like a barbed wire fence held up with stakes,

Alone I stand all out of puff,
Thankful for pills and all that stuff.
For to be out here at eighty or more,
Beats all those years in the army and war.

Alone I stand in my woollen hat,
The mountain range hides the sun.
Without my glasses, I`m blind as a bat,
I`ve disturbed a rabbit, he`s on the run.

Alone I stand my back to the wind,
Thinking of times long gone,
Alas, I cannot stay too long,
Time`s getting on.

Written by David A Wooster. October 1984

Mike says

" I have you to thank for ever for changing my course
and road in life "

Nuff said.