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Lay for the Day 30th
November
The feast of St Andrew, the national saint of Scotland and patron of fishermen
and sailors.
Forward
Forward from here, drawn
from
one to another
as the fullness lapses into waste,
the
waste heaps to new growth,
until the final sheer waste,
death
that is utter and complete,
and a long drink from the shadow waters
muttering
like dead souls over the shadowy stones.
Forward from darkness entanglements,
the
hollow ground where we woke,
to reach the threshold of the open field
and
lie among our clothes beneath the oak.
Upward sprung from the thin
green blade
to the
white grass flower,
sun-burned and lordly among the first grape-crop,
squinting
up the hill-slope at her.
And she a twist of hardy fire
still,
like a rowan tree in sunlight.
Onward carrying a baggage
of small verses,
of destiny
and bright-painted wooden objects,
downhill along a solemn colonnade of books
cool
the stone
of the calm, broken faces
to the
harbour antiquity built,
to cross the great stream in a wooden boat.
To be at the last an old man
on a bollard
among
salt-stiffened fisher-tackle tangled along the cobbles
on the quay, on the qui-vive, mending the nets,
but
doubly happy in the glare or shade,
whom I would listen to now
making
light of my youthful obscurity.
The
Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar
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