Imaginary Garden WIth Real Toads.28th. September

Ella, in the Imaginary Garden set the poetic challenge which suggested this poem. 


In Alnwick's Bookshop


There on the shelves of dross a gleam of gold.
A first edition "Tree of Idleness"
unsigned, but then, we can't have everything.
Why should his verses swim before my eyes,
most of these lines I've known so many years -
bringing me now to all-but-public tears?
Is it his 'single pining mandolin' that
'scratches on silence like a pet locked in'?
Or images of distance, cloud, hills, rain,
his 'lack of someone spreading like a stain.'
Yes, perhaps that. These found poems find me now
sundered from home, from sleep, from all I love,
from 'where brown fingers in the darkness move'
To find this book, this small excuse for weeping.

Lawrence Durrell, author of the stupendous "Alexandria Quartet", is now all but forgotten as a poet. A pity, for his lyric poetry is moving, tender and always musical. "The Tree of Idleness" (1955, Faber & Faber) was his fourth 'slim volume'.  All the quotes are from the title poem.

Alnwick, a small market-town in the county of Northumberland, UK, boasts the biggest second-hand bookshop in the country - some say in Europe, in the town's disused railway station. It really is a knock-out and very well worth a visit if you happen to be touring or staying there. But you won't find a first ed. "Tree of Idleness" - 'cos I've got it!

Magpie Tales#82

Revenants


There'll come a day some day when you'll be there
again. Your eyes the same, the same small hands,
your brushed hair lifted by the night wind, laid
onto your shoulder bare. And you will say
"Now it is time, dear. We have waited long,
each in our place and time. And what was strong
between us we'll replay. Come now, come away."

And I? Lost between "You!" and "How?" and "Why?"
will half believe that you are no more ghost
than I, then, hesitating, know that we
both are ghosts now, and this, Eternity.


(Suggested by Tess Kincaid's picture-prompt for Magpie#82, and by another poem, "Revenant," remembered from my schooldays.)