Jill Green
Oxford must be one of the places furthest from the sea in the British Isles. We are relatively small islands so lots of places are much nearer to it. Like many people, I have spent hours contemplating its ongoing timelessness, its power and movement, its rhythmic sounds, its human-damaged wildlife, and its plastic contamination. Perhaps above all, its increasing depth, reminding us constantly of our failings. It seems always to have a way of reminding us of things eternal.
We Oxfordians have not visited it as much as usual recently, for obvious reasons.
I have found a poem that has taken me back to it, from a volume of the American poet Galway Kinnell’s selected poems, published in 1982 by Houghton Mifflin/ Boston. His poetry has extraordinary range, is marked by a richness of language, a devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and makes supreme efforts to transform our understandings into the universality of art. It gives me so much pleasure to share it (in part, as it is too long for this article) with you.
Inspired by, and with thanks, to Alexander Westmacott
(43 Newsletter February 2021)
Spindrift
4
I sit listening
To the surf as it falls,
The power and inexhaustible freshness
of the sea,
The suck and inner boom
As a wave tears free and crashes back
In overlapping thunders
going away down the beach.
It is the most we know of time,
And it is our undermusic of eternity.
7
What does he really love,
That old man,
His wrinkled eyes
Tortured by smoke,
Walking in the ungodly
Rasp and cackle of old flesh?
Nobody likes to die
But an old man
Can know
A kind of gratefulness
Toward time that kills him,
Everything he loved was made of it.
—Excerpt from Galway Kinnell
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Forty-Three e-Newsletter • Number 503 • March 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW
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