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Spring Rain

A fine light moisture drifts to earth
In natural silence – it has nothing
To say, no endowment of, nor cause
For voice – it is, and it is falling,
Almost as mist in the air, glistening
On its surfaces, soaking into soil.
Still, we watch as it might be unhurried
Conversation, a dialogue of to and
Fro – of water in exchange with flecks
Of sunlight in mutual fall and settlement –
A gesture of offering and response
In the gentle equality of the season.
This communion cannot be spoken,
Cannot be written down, yet may
Be known in time, in sequent moments –
Now as continuance, and then
In details – as the falling water particles
Catch in the light, catch on the eye.
We watchers are not involved – being
Without invitation, the distance
Cannot be closed – and speech falsifies
A ceremony that has no use for words.
Come, let us leave water, light, earth,
To their means, to reflect and absorb.
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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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