Nightpiece
Who ever heard of a pleasant dream?
~ Robinson Jeffers
Once again, winding them in and about
the bare branches of our dead apple tree
across the dormant cherry and into an
erupting hazel, I thread buds on a string
trying to recall what pleasant thing
I was searching for in last night’s castle,
unable to retrieve from wherever I buried it
that story with its friendly opening faces.
I twist them up to hang there in the spaces
left by the squirrels and only a vague picture
(like those photos the light had interfered with
in our childhood albums, a ghostly smear)
of a crowd, of a woman taking a broom to clear
display cases, of a hurrying old man
inviting me in Arabic. It all
fades to darkness. But the dream was good.
And so are those pear-drop lights of childhood
that clunk to life and catch for me a distant
era of sweet carols and lit candles
balancing on spruce. This LED
obliterates what it thinks we need not see,
the real stars and their stories, hanging there
like so many irretrievable dreams,
follies a human sky can do without.
Nightpiece by John Greening | Sandalwood Rose Poetry Reed Diffuser
John Greening is a British poet, author of over twenty collections including The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor UP, ed.Kevin Gardner). As well as critical studies and translations, he has produced several anthologies and editions of other poets such as Matthew Arnold, Edmund Blunden, Geoffrey Grigson, Iain Crichton Smith and U.A.Fanthorpe. A book of essays, photographs and poems, A High Calling, appeared earlier this year and his Rilke is due from Baylor this autumn.
