Michaelmas Daisies

All stanzas share the same "edge" rhyme sound in lines one and six. Also, in each stanza a rhyme echo from the rhyme of the penultimate line appears somewhere in the last line.

   For comparison, way back in October 1979 I wrote "A Bowl of Chrysanthemums," one of my few "free verse" poems. I posted it on 12 November 2011 and it is linked here. Much more recently, in April 2015, I wrote "A Cherry Blossom," in which I looked closely at a single cherry blossom. I had in mind Jon Silkin's sequence of "Flower Poems" in which, similarly, he made a close study of a range of flowers. "A Cherry Blossom" was posted on 26 September 2019 and is linked here.

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At summer’s end, from every dint or edge,
Michaelmas daisies surge to shout their say:
   All’s failing: winds and chilling air,
      Short light and whipping rain,
Soon will brown with phthisis this spray, that spray
Of summer’s delicates; but ledge and hedge,
   St Michael’s daisies, against the grain,
      Maintain their dark-eyed stare.

Ha, the sea winds craze the blond-haired sedges,
The grey salt light frowns on the twitching gorse;
   But orange-pupiled, iris’d blue,
      Wax-brown legged, loll leaved,
Michael’s daisies rattle in shaken morse,
Asserting ledge-grabbed rights which autumn’s dredges
   Will not dislodge till all’s bereaved
      By November’s freezing dew.

They’re proxy of the seaboard men who pledged
Life’s limb from birth, gouging sea depths for spoil;
   And both, hard-minded in life’s risk,
      Defy the weather’s clamour;
Draining of colour, trawling sea or soil,
They cling this side of winter, rooted, kedged,
   Firm, though, that next year, come summer’s glamour,
      They’ll brag in the wind’s whisk.

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© August 2024

Busvargus Down

This is written in a mixture of iambic and trochaic lines. The final rhymes of stanzas one and two link to the first rhymes of stanzas two and three.

   Busvargus Down lies to the east of the village of Tregeseal which itself lies to the north of the town of St Just on the far west coast of Cornwall.

   Note: "Ela!" is Greek and is used colloquially to mean "come!" "Pugging" (a Shakespeare word from Autolycus' famous song in "The Winter's Tale," Act 4 scene 3) means thievish (in my sense, seize the moment). "Gilded flies" are butterflies. "Banting" is my neologism meaning slight, young, bouncy, bantering. A "mew" is a seagull. A "scrip" is a bag, purse, satchel. "Smicker" mans handsome, amorous, smiling.

   Another lyric, written as long ago as April 1980, is "What is the Use of Grinning." I posted it here on 31 March 2012. And a more recent and more discursive poem is "July Woods," written in July 2013 and posted here on 1 June 2015.

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   Ela! And here’s a lively thing
   Prods my pugging tooth to buzz:
         Summer’s heat
         And bright-air days
   Set Busvargus Down a’craze;
   The gilded flies are fluttering,
      Larks outsing their size
And hares, big-eyed, play touch-tag, suave and fleet.

   Truly it’s a thing that’s sweet,
   The bearded heather, yolksy gorse,
         Sky’s high blue
         And banting breeze
   Thithered as the prying bees;
   The adder though, rotund with meat,
      Curls question-marks, ignores
A pagan fieldmouse dancing slew and skew.

   Yapping, veers the white-splash mew –
   Scrip it, scrip it, ah this bon!
         Come nightfall, scents
         Like wine enlush
   The smicker air. Hist! through the hush
   Purls the dun nightjar, ancient, new;
      And a sudden light shone
Catches the spiders legging at their tents.

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© August 2024