One night I whispered to her
In late October – “The swans are back.”
But she was asleep, and so
I threaded them on our dreams.
And since, she saw them on her way to work,
And counted – ninety at least,
All feeding in a field, and not on dreams.
Then, one cold November weekend,
Pitching heavy footsteps around the lake,
We saw them coming in –
Or rather, heard, the sound-path low
And harsh, as if some beautiful weapon approached.
Out of the dark they came, stooped low,
The backing wings hollowing the air,
Paddles feeling for the other element;
Then wave after wave, and each time
Holding back the heart so that
Its beating waited on magnificence.
They carved themselves as strong in me
As the still ponds held the ageing light
Like china in the darkened fields.
But perhaps the shape was always there –
An image in the mind from Yeats –
And needed but the borrowed sky
As manuscript for mind and sight.
For they unearthed in me a need I did not know was there,
Not just for beauty planing out of air,
But need that is the same for me as for those Northern men,
My ancestors who sailed the winds,
Who knew no need but water, sky and shelter from the ice;
And when they saw it, settled, but
Did not delude themselves their foothold held upon the earth.
John H. Earl
Bede
The gulls rise in a white wave
from the Slake.
A plague replaces flood.
The wind blown in the wattle is
as tuneless as a trembling boy
who sings his prayers here
seven times a day;
yet holds to faith
the straw, the wood, the stone.
Here Michael stands triumphant
when
the manuscripts illuminate.
A white wave rising
from the Slake
has filled all Europe
with its Saxon light.
Eleanor Makepeace
