Just offering this up to readers today, Poetry Friday, for pleasure. Imagine being able to write this, a traditional sonnet - well, the rhyme scheme is his own - but traditional iambic pentameter, and come up with breath that burns a bush, love that can be pared, stars with husks, a halfmoon with a vegetable eye. A wonderful combination of traditional form and modern language. We can do this, you know - bend the form, make it our own.
I'm typing this up from Cannon Beach, Oregon, where the wind is blowing and rain lashing - a "discordant" June beach, if there ever was one.
WHEN ALL MY FIVE AND COUNTRY SENSES
When all my five and country senses see,
The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handful zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by.
The whispering ears will watch love drummed away
Down breeze
and shell to a discordant beach,
And, lashed
to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
That her fond
wounds are mended bitterly.
My nostrils
see her breath burn like a bush.
My one and
noble heart has witnesses
In all love’s
countries, that will grope awake;
And when
blind sleep drops on the spying senses,
The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.
—Dylan Thomas
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The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted this week over at Jama Rattigan's
wonderful Alphabet Soup. Head over there to see what people have posted.
