Love! What a harvest
this peasant boy reaps
Each night he watches
your golden yield sleep.
Bounty and abundance
swells the field called a heart
Each hour he eats
the ripe fruits falling off your cart.
Love, if only
the frost that gathers
had other claim.
O! then us
swollen, shining tin gods
would never wain
and we could harvest
all and every day,
on a vast unending golden plain.
The Fall of Winter and Harvest. How it come that you can so subtly bind nature with love? It has such strength that the whole images come up to me. Beautiful… I wish I could write like this…
Thanks George. I guess at the end of the day, my voice is very elegiac — a voice that longs to reconcile nature and man in some form and laments that incomplete struggle.
I think all good poetry is at bottom about the primal forces around us – what we call nature. About our estrangement from that also.
I’m not too convinced by modernists, futurists, surrealists, deconstructivists or even in some way what we call imagists and their “voice”. It doesn’t go far enough and is a response and not the source.
Like Auden, I try to sing about that spirit in all things. Hard to explain. I do like the Fall of Winter better — I always prefer a poem that has some concrete bearing. However Harvest has a better rhythm and flow…. Glad you like them, they are keepers me thinks….
Actually, I consider the Fall of Winter your best poem so far!