Read Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Online
Authors: Lynette Roberts
To these green woods where I found my love:
To the green wood where I held my love:
To the green wood now my love is gone.
I follow death that stands on my breath,
My heart cut out by the timeless scythe,
All grievous foliage stifling and still.
I carve marks on the bark’s rough edge
To convince my grief he came here once
Whose spirit shivers the aspen tree.
To the green wood where the woodcock flies,
To the green wood where the nightjar hides,
To the green wood with red eyes of a dove.
The young jays springing and curious
Who peck eyes from the lamb’s sweet face,
Resemble too well my heartless step.
For he loves me and I love another,
I love another yet he still loves me,
He loves me still yet I love another.
To the green wood where the green air fades;
To the green wood fluid with icy shades;
To the green wood afraid I follow fast:
Past Syrian Juniper and tall grass;
Hanging with dark secrets the Brewer’s spruce;
The pond that drew the young child in;
Among darkening leaves: a nightingale
Sobbing in the sunniest season,
‘My love, my Love, why do I love another?’
To the green wood where I found my love;
To the green wood where I held my love;
To the green wood now my love is gone.
Published in
Poetry
(Chicago), 81, 1952–3.
A pencil left in her sweet room,
If love is true then sing our tune,
Lovers always know their doom.
And his cool mind the pencils know,
And his pained eyes her hands attune,
Lovers’ glasses wine-rimmed flow:
Two glasses share each smile and pun,
These favoured two none else would do,
Held a secret… death sought one…
Amid the trees, and books on art,
In sun such greenwood songs grew blue,
Filtered through their drinking heart.
Now stiff in death like icing cake;
And green as moon the grasses’ hue;
Only one now drinks and waits:
But she whom death has iced away
Soon breaks in glassy fragments two
Birds and flowers from out her spray.
A pencil left in her sweet tomb,
If love is true then sing our tune,
Lovers always know their doom.
Published in
Poetry
(Chicago), 82, 1953.
A whirl of cobalt birds against
A cerulean sky, flashing light and seen
Through the rigid hand holding a vase
Of cornucopian grace.
Window, falling back like a concertina,
Mellow mild happiness.
A pink distempered warmth
A rainbow of books, only the day
Grey and dishevelled surrounds the village
Like straying hoofs.
A chart of bird songs, prints, and
Two china dogs shine wisely from the shelf.
The orange-scarlet brazier of coals,
Flickering flames mauve, red and green;
The crimson heart encircling my love
Photographed in the cabbage patch.
Published in
Poetry
(Chicago), 82, 1953.
The ‘pele’ fetched in. Water
Cracked, broken and watered down
Carried into the home. Sticks
Chopped on the iron top yard,
Then suddenly the snow. The sky opened
And out of it shed, these floating flakes
Dazzling blinding all earth’s features
Her smaller troubles and unfinished tasks
Covered by a huge silence.
‘Pele’ = mixture of coal dust, clay + water’ [LR’s note].
Sitting in the emerald of twilight
And I its singular flaw,
Whose eyes like forgotten stars droop
Nebulously into distant light years.
Wishing the past as dark as night
And the future all light, clarity’s rays.
Yet knowing obscurely
At some central motive of my being,
That all will arise, all turn,
Encircle me, as the light years have spun
Invisibly around their gravel point.
Through the trees… sea,
Down to the sea-lanes… sea,
Sea downs, down-stream,
Pools and prisms of water.
Black at its nightfall,
Wretched in its vapours,
White-pitched and
Pure in its daystream.
Sweet, meadowsweet air,
Quiet pastures sloping
Down, down to the sea,
Towards their own mirror
And sea, sea of perfection.
For seven days the dawn,
And on each day a fresh fold of sky
Until the fifth, when a thick glow
Spread like a heath fire, and the fields,
Farm and hedges lay beneath like a Welsh
Quilt frozen stiff upon the washing line.
Wailing, the birds, like no other day
Would come suddenly, fly away at the sight
Then flutter down from all sides,
All kinds together.
Neither from the frosted leaf nor from
The grey hard ground could they find
Relief. They were no longer birds but
Beings searching after food, spirits of flesh.
Peering at,- out of the trees.
[Handwritten comment by T.S. Eliot at the bottom of page: ‘Rough. but interesting’.]
I’ll not wash now Mam
The big red earth will
Rise in my face as I
Open the drill…
I’ll wash tonight.
And he died and lay
In the drill and the big
Red earth covered his face;
And he said this Saint Swithin
Now I am dead I can have
My wash, and it rained this day,
Next, and every day since.
If I could create one tree
And hang it in the sky
And spray it with the living
Gold of the sun, and hold
The natural pattern of its growth,
I would say that I had done
More than enough.
But observe when the sun
Has set against the black
Edge of the leaves,
How other leaves seem
To drift from one
Branch to another, or
Were they birds against
This darkwinged Brazilian sky?
Wings that edge the
São Paolo woods.
This flitting by,
This sudden appearance,
And inconsequence of time,
Is the moment I would
Hold before you;
Tomorrow evening it will
Have gone.
And as the log burnt up and bright
So we shared our simple pleasures;
And as the grate cooled and grew ashly
We fed at poverty’s gate;
Suffering persecution and equal bars
Of discomfort. It was not easy.
It is not
. In spite of the tempest raging
Over the planet’s calm green face.
Fields of camomile and clover
Wet and green as the lakes of Peru
Guarding Chapel deaths and their
Domineering graded stones padlocked
behind a spiked iron fence. The
Jealousies and jockeying for space,
Like chessmen where one move
Could shake the boards of death;
Where pawns can eliminate a queen,
Peasant, a squire’s disgraceful scene.
The now sad plighted machine-lettered century
Leaving no culture of their own, but a
Metallic copy of their earlier neighbours,
Whose deep set letters on shoulders of slate
Announced their death with the pride
Of a spirited horse.
Concrete slabs measured overnight into
A façade of walls. The top flat with its
New pane of vitamin glass, reflecting
A precipitous green of sky, of weird
Accumulator hue. No curtain out of
A square white room: but tree shadows tremulous
On ceiling. The parallel beams of sun
Shimmering with neon springs of air.
A chromium chair, and wider day of light;
A workshop from where ourselves we lean
Over sill and table: yet do remain surrounded
By boarding brothels: and through the lurid
Hours of dawn, face up to a firing squad
Who would not have us write and type
Not at that time of night!
Eyelashes like barley hairs,
Calm – sweet sighs
Absolving her angry
Interval like water
Overcasting fire. Shrill
Cries dissolving. Gurgles
And blue pool eyed caves
Stretch like a sewin of tantrums
And rest under the water’s wave.
Stern pattern cut.
A frosty child
Writhing with seasoned tooth
Purple headed and radiating
Rays of piercing pity, –
Poison and fissure distress.
Out of the hot womb into the cold night breeze,
Out of a synthesis of mist and winter pain,
Dark green ivy on wet branched trees,
Sprang to birth my son
From his own mother
Revealed
Overjoyed
God’s blessing from His mightiest word.
Green gregarious green
Dredged into the very roots,
Lighting up a shine of green
Green light bathing the earth.
The whither-thither of splendid leaves
Rollicking in the spring of the sky:
The wind breathes the branches apart,
To the core of its heartwood
And resilient rays.
Dark-glowering leaf pattern,
A spread of flaming black
Radiates at the tip of each blade,
Fixes an impregnable pattern
Of stoic growth of purpose,
In such a purposeless world.
When fold of iron blue and
Rolls of sparse corotesque grass
Recede further and further away
Leaving a multitude of space
Taking as you go
The salutation from my side
I imperceptibly accept the pale
Night and its immense face
In which to hide my frozen fear.
If you have your heart in a thing
Work or person and this is mocked at,
Then this is death.
It is a crack in the heart
That saps your pulse away
Into a damp pattern.
That flattens the mind
Like mountain ash against the sky
With frost crouched close at its heel.
Very strange is this fish and gift,
Instinctively it has a myth;
Caves of Poseidon watch it drift
Towards Medusa’s opal plinth,
Orphic chants on pink scaled nights
Resemble well my lover’s rites.
With eyes like tired skies and shifting explosion
Of nerves; these saints of Bloomsbury, blue bulls
And poodle men, sniff out their congested haunts,
Shelve, or move on a drink scrounge to a plaid green pub.
Sneer over plastic tables at the empty glass;
Drink – in caustic celebrities to upbraid them –
When their own minds warn them of defeat –
That ‘they are as phoney as a porterhouse steak’
Then to return in rubbled muddle, with flashing
Ties and black picoted nails; round and out
Into the bleak night of streets; down coffered cellars:
To peony papered walls: broken beds: chip and bacon whores.
There was a carpenter at my door,
And the smell and sound of the paint blew into
My nostrils and ears, and gathered
My thoughts, as I looked out of the window
With my hands warm among the washing socks
To the wet earth sodden with too much water
And the green plants persisting
Among the cavernous ruins.
And this I remembered.
It was a long time ago and they were
Of mellow brick. The books charred and torn
Falling out of their structure.
Such is the justice of man that he will
Appal at such destruction; yet for the same feat,
Go with heroic strides to have his own breast
Plated with tinkling medals.
Under this Sacred Temple,
Inner Temple and London’s Shrine, such
A week’s devastation melted half the
Block with the fury of rising flame-throwers.
Then to Pimlico where I took the bus���
I found warm flesh charred…
It was a long time ago,
And there at the same time a family
Unknown gave me an egg from their only hen
And an armful of mauve lilac:
They promised me as well some Iris roots,
‘They’d send to Wales’, they said.
I ate the egg. Destroyed my soul,
For such an immense tragedy can not withold a soul.
But I did not receive the Iris roots.