James Deahl

The Sorrow of God

A Morning Poem
for Robert Bly

I awake at dawn to a day of frozen sleet,
A cold day at the end of February
With the mountain’s face buried in cloud.

It’s so early no one else seems to be up;
Then I hear a car start, its engine warming
By the house next door. Silently the mists lift.

I read last night that a moment of sorrow
Preceded creation, that act that summoned
The Earth into being, and us with it.

The house finches have already returned;
I see them waiting on the telephone wire.
My neighbour enters his car and drives off.

My mountain ash stands locked in a ring of ice,
But the night’s wind has dropped to nothing.
Later, I suspect, this ice will melt.

The day’s still quiet, my children asleep
In their rooms under the eaves. And I cannot
In my moment of time believe in a god of sorrow.

James Deahl

James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970 and holds Canadian citizenship. He’s the author (or, in the case of Tu Fu’s poetry, translator) of twenty literary titles.

G. E. Stevens

Aubade

You were never so easily known, as you were then —
under the influence of not much time and somebody else’s
kitchen.
I remember your eye contact, it was off — starting early
then falling too soon — perhaps you knew it burnt my skin
a little.
And with such gentle persuasion you turned our rowing
boat of words
all paint and pleasure
away from precedent.

Dawn filled our glasses, made us read love poems.
Once, you stopped me mid-breath, —
just those last few lines again, you said
yes, I said
and the words broke over us in rain, rain.

G.E. Stevens is a published poet and critic living in London. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. G.E. Stevens is currently completing a poetry MA under Lavinia Greenlaw and will shortly be beginning a practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway. She is working on her first pamphlet.

Merryn Williams

2003

That autumn the colours were exceptionally vivid,
everywhere, trees broke out in topaz, crimson,
flame; a huge moon rose over the ancient buildings,
and I thought I’d got over it, but I had not.

The colour scale stretched from snowberry to privet;
bryony, rosehip, spindle ran riot in hedgerows,
rare shades of purple, too; meanwhile, the red candles
of Lords and Ladies lit my dark passage home.

But I was back in a certain intensive care unit
whose doors were closed; I no longer had any reason
to go there. Unripe crab apples strewed the towpath
that autumn, and sloe berries set my teeth on edge.

I went to grammar school in Hastings in eleven-plus days, studied English at New Hall, Cambridge, and got a doctorate for my thesis on Thomas Hardy’s novels. After that I taught adult students for the Open University and the W.E.A., living for several years near Cranfield University where my husband worked as a physicist. I am literary adviser to the Wilfred Owen Association, having a great interest in the poets of the First World War. Shoestring have just published her The Fragile Bridge: New and Selected Poems.