let it be enough some mornings

This is an old poem, from a different place, but the wild November weather here, exhilarating in its way when the wind is up, is reminiscent of the winter weather back in Devon, except maybe 2 degrees warmer. This poem has come into my mind several times recently.

Let it be enough some mornings

High tide, a wild morning, wild and stormy,

and you take the leaf-deep stony path

above seal-grey waters

where the geese are dragged

through the sodden air like ripped-away prayer flags

in a crazy disordered dance, and the waves

slap hard on the mudflats’ flanks,

and for once questions like

what use is poetry, if you’re starving, or a refugee

squeezed between torture and war, or bleeding alone

in some dark alley

have momentarily flown, though left you unguarded;

but bent low over the creek the damson tree

drops unremarked a cargo of fruit

on the waters –

mornings like this

grey and green with straggled leaves 

and the rain storming the opaque sky

let it be enough now to hear this one curlew keen,

to have one last bedraggled swallow skim the thick air

over your head, see the inkcaps’ effortless

overnight arrival,

to witness one small flower –

samphire, or a late marsh marigold –

struggling through black mud on its journey upwards

against gravity, pointing the way –

let each day be a small triumph, let it be

two fingers to death.

© Roselle Angwin, Looking For Icarus, bluechrome 2005/IDP 2015