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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
THE LIFE SO SHORT, by EAMON GRENNAN Poem Explanation Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: The wind colder even than march in maine, though the same sea Subject(s): Life; Transience; Mortality; Birds | |||
Sitting outside when the sun shines, I hold up my throat to the open blade of it: soundwaves crest at my sleepy ears, leaving their flotsam of birdsong, tractors ticking over on the near hill, the long clean line of bee-sound and that sudden highpitched, rasp-blue riff of a bluebottle, syncopation of two builders' hammers, this watery breeze-in-leaves or that clicketing wren tapping out its speedy Morse - tiktik tikettytiktik tik. It's why I love the place: for the blessing of a break in bad weather that's lasted and lasted, the sudden good day opening around me like a book of poems you'd love and sip at - illumination after illumination, a tame linnet on your heated shoulder singing and staying there without a fear in the world as time itself rolls back and lets you in on its secret, that for the time being it has folded its tent and taken to the air and dissolved in it, and so there's time to catch that discreet throat- clearing hhack! of the approaching pheasant, read the thick calligraphy of white lichens on the rock, ice-rounded, that stood near the door here as part of the garden wall for a hundred years and more, or the duff green cover of moss on big stones that lift their backs above their elemental grass like dolphins. And under the garden - between the living room window and the barb-wired bank of grass - there's a seam of fireclay, its gray porridge absolute gray, a mush you'd draw up in the old days to make a hearth-back, slapping on wet by hand and waiting for it to dry in dungsmoke and turfsmoke to its own impregnable core. So I'll sit here till the shade of the east-facing cottage finds me with its chill, then walk out into the domain of digitalis, cuckooflower, scabious, and mountain larks who liquefy the air and stand on the wind like artists of their own furious musical repose, while in and out of the ancient passage grave, between its great unpended courtly stones, fly stonechat and starling, blackbird, rose-chested linnet, wren, in and out of the burial court of great men in their time, these live birds who know nothing of the space we share but what their beaks and bones tell them, and their lit, quicksilver eyes. Copyright © Eamon Grennan http://www.wlu.edu/~shenando | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...GLIMPSES OF THE BIRDS by JOHN HOLLANDER GLIMPSES OF THE BIRDS by JOHN HOLLANDER AUDUBON EXAMINES A BITTERN by ANDREW HUDGINS DISPATCHES FROM DEVEREUX SLOUGH by MARK JARMAN A COUNTRY LIFE by RANDALL JARRELL CANADIAN WARBLER by GALWAY KINNELL YELLOW BIRD by KENNETH SLADE ALLING |
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