More Poems Of Nick Hallam.

Hope you enjoy!

Tom

OLWEN

Olwen asleep,
None more beautiful;
Olwen awake was head-turning,
But Olwen asleep –
Give way Waterhouse, that idyll,
Even your naiads of the deep
Must shatter lake’s looking-glass for yearning.

18 September 2010

“Hylas and the nymphs”
John William Waterhouse RA RI ROI
Historical genre painter 1849-1917

THE BRIDGE

I love this little brook,
Its bridge-
A simple sleeper laid across
On tumbling stone, beneath a tree,
And all the heavens overhung,
A wish of wind' of robin’s song;

Pray, when my span is done
And I –
A simple sleeper laid beneath
A cross of stone, another tree,
His bridge may brook my stumbling

13 May 2002

PARADOX

Heat –
Enough to cleave the boles of this
Beside the Derwent, maple grove;

Indeed a treecreeper and her love
Think so too – as, for their nestlings,
Beaks full,
And to and from their river-bank,
They swim the haze of middle spring;

But then
The woman in the backless blouse goes by,
The maple shadows patterning her,
And cleft and dimple heat and cool-
And sure, with backwards glance,
She sees me too as some sort of treecreeper,
And patently, she will not be my love.

22 May 2001

FEATHERY*

Driver, me –
He, bold as brassie,
Spooned in my headlights;

“A top hatful of down” they say –
Filled up with down, segmented skin;
This sewn brown ball sits up to see
Me, stopped, (had nearly topped him)
Slowly get out, but what to do?
Which stroke to take, a wood, an iron?
Must not shank him, hook or slice –
Least harm, best try the old air shot,
A total miss should be a hit;

With phantom niblick’s loft, cupped hands,
I clap, wedge, sharp behind him,
Risk some sand, and
High he soars, how silently,
Into the starlit valley’s bowl
Goes, whole, in one – a Little Owl.

4 August 2010

*Feathery – a name given to one of the first golf balls,
each packed, it is said, with the equivalent of a top hat’s volume of feathers.

ON A WALK TO A PARADISE GARDEN

Spring’s wind afire,
That all about is Delius –
About the beeches and the chestnuts
Bleached, all Winter’s reckoning;

That all the papers have to say is
“Snow expected”.

That cumulus, cumulo-nimbus,
That far beyond, a flint, a spark,
High cirrus, touching-off the moon;
Spring’s wind afire-
That rooks are reconnoitring,
A parliamentary conflagration,
Are smuts on smuts,
That they are almost of the wind,
A kind of cawing evanescence.

23 February 2001

With Delius on the car radio

DELIVERANCE

From near stalling, failing
Falling among fronds
Of the too close trees;
Brown plumaged plunge
To a near hazard,
To an almost tangle
Among twig tendrils –

To this wizard, this other,
Legerdemain’s master,
Magician of skies;
Vizier of flight’s grandeur,
This wonder, this buzzard –
From what might have been terminal,
To on high on a thermal.

30 August 2010