Poem
John Burnside
OVER KELLIE
OVER KELLIE
OVER KELLIE
If summer is conversation,then winter is thought;
or so it seems tonight: rain in the trees
and, halfway between our house
and the neighbour’s farm,
a lost ewe in the fence-wire
waits for dawn;
as I am waiting now,
for something new:
a way of thinking come in from the fields;
a music, spare and empty as a psalm,
or like a question no one thinks to ask
until the wind remembers on his skin,
a sky beneath the sky, the dreaming grass,
acres of homeland, measured out in stars.
© 2006, John Burnside
John Burnside
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1955)
John Burnside was born in Dunfermline, Fife, between the firths of Forth and Tay, in 1955. He lived in the English home counties and Gloucestershire before returning to Fife a few years ago. He studied English and European languages in Cambridge, and after working as a computer engineer became a fulltime writer; he also teaches at St Andrew’s University. He has won and been short-listed for sev...
Poems
Poems of John Burnside
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OVER KELLIE
If summer is conversation,then winter is thought;
or so it seems tonight: rain in the trees
and, halfway between our house
and the neighbour’s farm,
a lost ewe in the fence-wire
waits for dawn;
as I am waiting now,
for something new:
a way of thinking come in from the fields;
a music, spare and empty as a psalm,
or like a question no one thinks to ask
until the wind remembers on his skin,
a sky beneath the sky, the dreaming grass,
acres of homeland, measured out in stars.
OVER KELLIE
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