Summer Sonnets

(READ the bottom one first.)

Glancing through the little green book of my teenage poems which are cringeworthy and exhilarating by turns (the ones I remember as being good sometimes are barely OK, others I'd written off turn out to be much better ...) I found the following that recalls how I'd been feeling: at odds with high summer. ((Actually this was more the bottom poem. The top one's about winter.) When I say "cringeworthy" I'm referring to the seminonsensical phrases e.g. "cherried twigs" (this must mean the branches of a cherry tree, decked out in blossom each springtime, weighed down with fruit each autumn - yet vulnerable, gnarled and bare by winter "snaps of grief"... I don't know. Notice the reference to "scuds" - this was written during the first Gulf War. Well what else can I say? O! Except the title - till 10 minutes ago it didn't have one. So I'm not sure about what to call it ... Better let it speak for itself:

Sonnet

When smoky summer sparks the fire of gloom
and golden smoulderings sun the wind and sky
and drops of death infuse the fragrant tomb,
the brittling earth, and scuds of tempest fly;
we glaze the cherried twigs in snaps of grief
and blanket sleep in melancholy snow;
the gaze has cracked the tangle of belief:
at night I see the numb of embers glow.
Tomorrow was the mist of yesterday,
and by each day a hollow seeming passed
like dreaming cloud adrift along its way
to where the dregs of yesterday were cast.
Do not despair when fire lingers long:
this nothingness has nowhere to belong.

Copyright by Gledwood 2007
Actually written around 1991, 1992 ...

OK Actually THIS is the one I was intending to post up. Really this one should be read first. It summarizes something about summer that seemed pertinent to me last night:

The heaven of the freshest, bluest air
is lighter than the shadows of my soul,
wherein the sunlight casts a strange despair,
and bit by bit my madness eats me whole.
When I forgot the universal blue
and raindrops showered on me, cold and grey,
the mirrors of chill grief reflected you:
the enemy who darkened every day.
Arising now from oceans deep as gloom,
the glowing globe is water-green from high;
I drowned within the confines of the tomb,
and shimmer now, a ripple of the sky.
A breath of death expires and pain is slow;
its recollection dies far down below.

Copyright by Gledwood 2007
This one also written c.1992.