“For me, poetry is always a search for order.”
Elizabeth Jennings
Catch As Catch Can
by Jonathon Price (1931 – 1985)
Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught
Or else be beaten to it by the bell.
Hardly a day passes without that thought.
Trammelled in tenses, snagged by could and ought,
The careful trekker cannot very well
Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught,
For what comes gratis, and what must be bought,
And what the long-term cost is, who can tell?
Hardly a day passes without that thought.
Old knots defy untying: guy-ropes, taut,
Stay one securely. Anglers up the fell
Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught:
To make a killing from an artful sport
They cast fine long lines like a subtle spell.
Hardly a day passes without that thought
As good scouts plod to their prosaic hell.
So can the weaver of a villanelle
Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught?
Hardly a day passes without that thought.
Into the Hour
by Elizabeth Jennings
I have come into the hour of a white healing.
Grief’s surgery is over and I wear
The scar of my remorse and of my feeling.
I have come into a sudden sunlit hour
When ghosts are scared to corners. I have come
Into the time when grief begins to flower
Into a new love. It had filled my room
Long before I recognised it. Now
I speak its name. Grief finds its good way home.
The apple-blossom’s handsome on the bough
And Paradise spreads round. I touch its grass.
I want to celebrate but don’t know how.
I need not speak though everyone I pass
Stares at me kindly. I would put my hand
Into their hands. Now I have lost my loss
In some way I may later understand.
I hear the singing of the Summer grass
And love, I find, has no considered end,
Nor is it subject to the wilderness
Which follows death. I am not traitor to
A person or a memory. I trace
Behind that love another which is running
Around, ahead. I need not ask its meaning.
Fourteen Lines 