FROM AN ARMCHAIR
Through the large window at the end of the room
I can see, out in the April garden,
a sudden wind broadcasting the blossom,
from next door’s ancient pear tree, like snow flakes.
A female blackbird is collecting bedding
and struts of twigs and grass, and airlifting
them into the ivy that covers the fence.
On the CD player, between melody
and chords, a dead guitarist’s fingers
slide so poignantly across the strings and frets.
A black and white lithograph, fifty eighth
in a series of a hundred entitled
‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’, bought in Moscow’s
Izmailovsky Market – the May Putin
was first crowned – from the artist’s son, the father
fallen, like most of Russia on hard times, shows,
through a thicket, a tangle of leafless
birch trees, a stretch of water gleaming: beyond,
a low rise with a pale fence and a wooden
dacha small against an alabaster sky.
I write a couplet, in my head, that is
of such Arcadian perfection, of such
bucolic beauty, it stutters into
silence, like the light of fireflies in a jar.
Clive Watkins
September 14, 2023The final four lines of this are just beautiful, David.
KEVIN DYER
September 15, 2023Good. Very good. Nature, humanity, Russia. Good to bring those together. Thank you.