My liveliest self, I give you fair leave
in these windblown weathers,
heather-hearted and human and strange,
to turn every blackberry corner
of yesterday’s summer.
The robin, singing her love-me-forever,
kiss-catch-clutch-in the heather
blues, sings tide flow
and autumn’s turning and white
winds folding.
Cattle along all hedges wind winter
into their frosty
breathing, their slow eyes dreaming
barn, bullock, and fodder
under all hedges.
But sea cave and sycamore tell us the world
is wider than weather.
Blackberries darken the corners
I turn, and gold seas turning
darken, darken.
My liveliest self, my other, Godspeed
on our farings.
The bronze path at evening. Toward summer,
then. My hand, your hand—
as if first meeting.
John Unterecker, "Song at Drumholm" from Stone, published by University of Hawai’i Press. Copyright © 1977 by John Unterecker. Reprinted by permission of Estate of John Unterecker.
Source:
Stone (University of Hawai'i Press, 1977)
Poet, editor, and scholar John Eugene Unterecker earned an MA and a PhD at Columbia University. He is the author of Stone: Poems (1977), the critical work A Reader’s Guide to W.B. Yeats (1959), and the biography Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (1969), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Editor of the Columbia University Press American Poets series, Unterecker taught at the College of the City of New York, Columbia . . .
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