Five miles up, the hush and shoosh of ash,
yet the sky is as clean as a wiped slate-
I could write my childhood there. Selfish
to sit in this garden, listening to the past-
a gentleman bee wooing its flower, a lawnmower-
when grounded planes mean ruined plans, holidays
on hold, sore absences from weddings, funerals,
wingless commerce.
But Britain’s birds
sing in this spring, from Inverness to Liverpool,
from Crieff to Cardiff, Oxford, London Town,
Land’s End to John O’ Groats; the music silence summons,
that Shakespeare heard, Burns, Edward Thomas; briefly, us.
How liberating to be free of ourselves!
After a night of Political Drama and a morning of warring journalism which suggests that detachment or lord forbid truth shall remain ghosts in the grinding machinery of an everlasting ‘spin cycle’, I found this on the web; contemplative, quiet and comforting. Duffy reminds us of the brief time capsule we found ourselves in when the skies no longer were noisy motorways, streaked with contamination and aspiration. The garden she sat in, thinking about time and space and geography seems a sanctuary from hectic progress. And just reading the poem this morning, I felt a liberation from myself; a sense of perspective perhaps, engendered by the thoughtful tone and pace of a poem that gives voice to silence and its value in this shrill voiced world of ours.
And the notion of the ‘gentleman bee’ is perfect! Captures a lost age and seems dignified too!