Four Songs in the Autumn | a collection of poems

Four poems: The Wheel, The Raincoat, The Rushes, The Dead.

CHECK OUT TWM GWYNNE’s book of poems here.

The Wheel

Words seem to arise tired

In the attempt to relate and tell

The particular, far-ranging changes

Of the perennial strain.

 

It has become my thought that these

Repeating struggles

Of trauma and drama played out around and

Above the spokes of a slow-rolling wheel

Must be retold with fresh words,

Must be rearranged and

Reborn in relevance to strangely

New-old times,

To oddly-shaped and new-old lives.

 

The blight of lives is real again

In us

And the cycle cannot be escaped;

All there is to do is coax out words and coat

The atavistic sorrow,

The stinging salts

Spent-out by the sweating lust

And dried tears the same,

Indistinct in a fresh language.

 

My mind’s expression of a moment

Can, as such, aspire to no more nor less

Than the poignancy of a morning mist

Swiftly dispersed

By the reborn Sun of a cold new day.


The Raincoat

 

My pockets are weighed down

With acorns -

The baggy, sagging carriers

Ballooning out of sleek lines,

Deforming the new rain coat.

 

I wasn’t used to wearing them

As a soft-skinned child,

I might be seen, instead,

Standing in a field

Exultant in the rain,

Laughing,

Lost in the revelation. 


The Rushes

 

It was a false flag! you say triumphantly.

No – now me, confused, concernedly -

No such plant is in this place.

It's sweet flag, conceivably.

 

All you rushing partisans

Have left me bruised;

Learn instead to name the rushes,

And, in their tender, swaying hushes,

Sit a while on stones.

Through and by these quiet signs

Be overthrown

And of your mind be disabused.

I can’t watch your stumbling dance

Any more,

Your spectacle, to me,

Is just another eyesore.


The Dead

 

The dead are sleeping, dead, in the hills

Where old bones are ground in mist

And falling water drives the turn of their slow dreaming;

Their day will come again

Bright on bold new shapes.


TWM GWYNNE

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Grubby animist, poet, gardener. More of his writing can be found at his blog, Y Dyn Gwyrdd, and a short collection of his poetry is published through the Ritona imprint of Gods & Radicals press.

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