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Looking up from Sonnet 116

Its presence there hadn’t struck me before,
But I like to see the ladder where I left it,
Legs splayed between the orange trees:
Now that all but the very last of the fruit
Is picked, juiced or peeled and eaten,
The spare, skeletal, aluminium frame
Has taken on another quality, reflecting
In its surrounds the unchanging stability
Of the cyclical, asserting in its stillness
The fertility there is in promising.
Orange trees, of course, keep their leaves,
And the bare, bright, metal of the ladder –
Statement of the will to reach beyond
The limits of the physical, the human,
As a vow of love in consecrating feeling –
Will accompany their continuance, outlast
Other losses of the winter, will resist the rain,
Endure the cold, the early dark, and
Remain itself, a thing to climb, there
When the trees are full of oranges again.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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