I Will Wade Out, a poem by E.E.Cummings.

Post 650 - Here's a poem for the New Year.

I Will Wade Out by E.E.Cummings.

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

I will take the sun in my mouth

and leap into the ripe air

Alive

with closed eyes

to dash against darkness

in the sleeping curves of my body

Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery

with chasteness of sea-girls

Will i complete the mystery

of my flesh I will rise

After a thousand years

lipping

flowers

And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

A wedding is the entrance to a marriage by William Byrd.

Post 649 - William Byrd (born in London in 1543, died in 1623 at Stondon Place in Essex) was the son of a musician, and studied music principally under Thomas Tallis. Byrd was the most prolific composer of his time in England and was known as the English Palestrina. Here is his wedding poem:

A Wedding Is.. by William Byrd.

A wedding is the entrance to a marriage:

One drives through, and suddenly one's there!

Stepping from a fairy tale carriage


Into quite ordinary air.

Life is now a dance, though beautiful,

Requiring intense coordination;

Each self becomes, in ways inscrutable,

More fully what it is in combination.

And we who love you wait, of course, outside


As you become through love that mystery:

One flesh made whole of separate groom and bride;

Two selves, one life; two notes, one harmony.

When you are one, we then may cherish two:

Loving not just one, but both of you.

Beannacht, a poem by John O'Donohue.

Beannacht ("Blessing") by John O’Donohue.

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

Interview with the Wind, a poem by Alice Oswald.

Post 646 - Alice Oswald was born in 1966. She read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon. In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her debut collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, won the 1996 Forward Best First Collection prize and her second collection, Dart, won the 2002 TS Eliot prize. In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year). In 2009 she published both A sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.

Interview with the Wind by Alice Oswald.

Once the Wind existed as a person


Carrying its unguarded inner mouth wide open . . .

And I notice a kind of girlish nervousness


Sensitive to any tiny shock, tell me,

When did it lose its mind?

I love the kind of sounds it carries.

I think of the Wind as the Earth's voice muscle,

Very twisted and springy, but is it tired?

What happens to bells for example

Being lifted over hills?

And prayers?

There are millions of grass-nibs trying their names on the air.

There are phrases not fully expressed, shaking the bars of the trees.

Never any conclusion. Every decision being taken back again into movement.

Why?

And on a long road on a hot day,

When the Wind gets under the Wind


And blows up a mist of dust,

Obviously it speaks in verse, obviously


It inhales for a while and then describes by means of breath


Some kind of grief, what is it?

A kind of kiss. A coldness.

And yet not uptight, not afraid to fondle.

Is it blind is it some kind of blindness


The way it breezes at Dusk


And goes on and on turning over and over


More and more leaves in the darkness?

A kind of huge, hushed up,

Inexhaustible, millions of years old sister.

Would she describe herself, when running over grass for example,

Would she describe herself as a light breeze?

Or is she serious?