Juliet Henderson
Michael Taylor, is a translator, writer (some of you may have heard of his book Rembrandt’s Nose), and poet. He is also an old friend who kindly shares monthly collections of his poems. His work always reveals to me the deeper spirit and essence in just about every aspect of our and others’ lives. This October collection is no exception, and I am moved to share it with Friends.
SUMMER’S END, by Michael Taylor
BUTTERFLIES
To be airborne, to be light, to lift, to glide
above flowers and be one with the wind
the sun sleeping between trees.
To be nowhere and everywhere at once
forever free
as though air could shift like dreams.
To slip like music from instrument
to instrument, to be nothing
and everything in one breath.
To be those exhalations of summer
quivering on wings as frail as thought.
To be anything really but this self
plodding from place to place.
CLOUDS
You’d think they had been tossed in a game
or idle experiment
with shadow and light, veils behind veils
or walls piled on walls.
Some lead nowhere.
Others are cities lost in sand.
Some are as huge
as the palaces of demented kings
but in another minute
it’s as if they had never existed.
Light always wins. Light
sweeps above, between, below
the shifting romances
they’re always building.
SWALLOWS
They have gone. The west wind
has cleared the sky of them.
I didn’t even see them assemble on wires.
They’ve gone.
The air is strangely still.
The silence is the silence of their not being there.
ROCK
Inside rocks it’s dark. They crop up in fields or fall from cliffs or tumble down slopes. You pick them up or stumble upon them. Impermeable to light, they open to air. You follow their windings where rivers churn, animals take shelter, men once hunted. They are mostly irregular. Even when shaped by the sea, their ovals and ellipses are imperfect. Except for sheets of alabaster, they do not let day through. They are like darkness made hard. But a starless moonless impenetrable darkness. This is something you cannot truly understand. If you were inside one of them you couldn’t discern it’s color.
RAIN
One by one the raindrops fall in the dust.
Then by twos and threes, then in a sudden rush.
“At last,” you think, imagining
what it feels like to be the earth.
BEES
The forest sings. You’d think
it would be still on an evening like this.
But hundreds of wings
hum among the high leaves.
Even down here
earth and moss and ferns
murmur among the long shadows
and sunbeams.
Whether heard or unheard
the forest sings.
LEAVES
Summer’s torn. Scraps of warmth scatter
this way and that under trees
They’re bronze and yellow and orange and red
yet you would live forever in the green
they leave behind and seem to defy.
STARS
They will not fly away. They shone
before I was born
and will shine long after I die.
Serfs and kings saw them.
They shone for emperors
and philosophers, for Ovid
by the Black Sea and Homer’s heroes
beneath the walls of Troy
and the nameless masters
who breathed life into bison
on dark walls.
When all the animals have gone
and there will be no one to miss
them they will still shine.
Photos by SL Granum
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 511 • November 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW