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
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.