Rural Requiem

For Margaret Eddowes

Now’s the time to set sorrow to a song,
While all the days of summer start,
And renew the duties that belong
To feeling, and renew the heart
Itself, to take the part
Of one in whom the blooms of nature showed
As if they never would depart,
One who left her life as if it were a road
Across high country, there always to be followed.

Dear woman, aunt, friend, how to mourn you?
What to say? Feeling overwhelms thought
And duty drowns. The honour due
Any stays today in the flimsy fort
Of our affections, nothing fought,
And life, counted as a debt
Or squandered, passes, and no good thing bought:
Yet sorrow wants expression, and regret
Redemption, as if these had value yet.

I remember the time the herd of bulls –
The two-year-olds – broke into the garden
In a black-backed sea, turning us kids to fools,
And the house into a pen
We didn’t dare to open –
The loud, frightful heads milling at the doors –
Bravery you taught us, children then,
Seeing you, apron-waving, lay down farming’s laws,
Driving them off amazed, wheeling on all fours.

But there are things that will not turn,
But come on, and must, and over-run
Fences, hedges, gardens and – we learn –
Whole lives: yours, like that of anyone.
And where we build and face the sun,
Where the bright, waving trees hold their flowers
Above the sea, is land off others won
Before us, in spite of palisades and towers,
Bravery and goddesses, and as briefly it is ours.

Spirits fade a place like ancient cattle,
And people follow the full foliage of the trees,
But still, surely, the fresh, new waters trickle
Down to the mangroves and the washing seas –
Still, surely, the forces that please
Return? Yet I saw some who owned half
The land up north once, ridiculed for these –
Your – essential kindnesses, saw their sons without a calf,
And the hills carved up with a laugh.

I loathe my thoughts, the way they go awry –
What memories are these to keep into another year?
I gather hates and see what’s beautiful die,
As if this were autumn or winter here:
Yet so fitfully and fragile the stars appear
Tonight, and all the looming sea a riot
Of white, how difficult to steer,
To maintain a course and not submit
To the anarchy of water, and disappear in it.

This is a grave of better seamanship than mine,
And I’ve none so fine a boat as hers,
And that reduced to driftwood, sticks of pine,
Where the shallow, muddy water stirs:
Surely something in nature errs –
I never saw humanities so combined,
And these – yours – gone, the distinction blurs
That shows a truly gentle mind,
These broken fragments all there is to find.

What hope of flowers in these dying pools?
I gaze on matted water, stiff with weed,
And you, gardening – your trug of tools,
Fingers in the earth – are memories that speed
Across reflection, and nothing moves but to feed:
So too, you hardly dared to feel,
Like summer’s flies, and not for need,
Those to whom you gave would make a meal
Of your charity, until there was nothing left to steal.

But there was a time before this despair,
High on those open hills, where the bulls ran,
And there was reason to be glad where
The narrow, dusty road began
Its climb above the dark frond and fan
Of fern rising in the deep damp shade
Of undergrowth, and where – suddenly, in an
Apparition of sunlight – the lake below displayed
Its brilliant silver, welling where the full sun played.

This was a place that mattered, where
The herds in their slow waves of movement –
Tails flicking at the shifting air –
And dogs scattering to command from an idle scent,
Were parts of a beauty that meant
More than any other you were to find,
And when it was lost, began that descent
To where all our sorrow is defined,
In the pity of a death, and what little is left behind.

I look and see the ease there is in that leap
That takes the fly turning on the stream,
And the water seems a thing asleep,
Where quick, disappearing trout gleam –
Movements of light – as in a flickering dream
Flowering from some dark, invisible root,
And on the drifting air the flies team,
Like petals loosened from the shoot,
As the apples shed their blossom and set the fruit.

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