Poem
Peter Riley
THE CHILDREN OF MARAMURES
THE CHILDREN OF MARAMURES
THE CHILDREN OF MARAMURES
A wooden bowl full of blue and red berries,fresh from the bushes beside the roads, washed of petrol stains.
Take it: love with reason, their eyes say,
therefore hope, without reserve.
Take the gift, accept the reason, lever our hearts over the barricade
with an explanation.
The children stare wide eyed at the strangers
and smile for ever. The day
moulded out of light, the mutual seed,
springs open in time it costs nothing but persistence.
A linking gesture across the border holds the ring dance open to
the hearth,
where the old ones sit.
Wisps of blue smoke rise from the houses
into the distance. The true moment moves among us,
everyone’s work as it works everyone’s
fault as it fails, held in the song’s return, a hope
balanced on a point of flesh against fate’s gerrymandering,
everyone’s wish in your tear ever shining
And stabled there. Politicians and clouds
brush the fine heads of the children turned upwards;
a laugh, short and light, rolls down the land,
a reasoned hope in which they turn in the dance, hand on sleeve:
Welcome welcome, bird in the bush, fish in the flood,
futureless presence ringing the earth.
© 2007, Peter Riley
From: The Day\'s Final Balance: Uncollected Writings 1965-2006
Publisher: Shearsman Books, Exeter
From: The Day\'s Final Balance: Uncollected Writings 1965-2006
Publisher: Shearsman Books, Exeter
Peter Riley
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1940)
Peter Riley must now count as one of our ‘senior poets’, with a large back-catalogue of publications, but he occupies a strange position in contemporary English letters, due in no small part to the sheer range of his work. In some respects, this range, and his interests, rule him out of contention for a number of critics, and it would be fair to say that he probably annoys as many critics from ...
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THE CHILDREN OF MARAMURES
A wooden bowl full of blue and red berries,fresh from the bushes beside the roads, washed of petrol stains.
Take it: love with reason, their eyes say,
therefore hope, without reserve.
Take the gift, accept the reason, lever our hearts over the barricade
with an explanation.
The children stare wide eyed at the strangers
and smile for ever. The day
moulded out of light, the mutual seed,
springs open in time it costs nothing but persistence.
A linking gesture across the border holds the ring dance open to
the hearth,
where the old ones sit.
Wisps of blue smoke rise from the houses
into the distance. The true moment moves among us,
everyone’s work as it works everyone’s
fault as it fails, held in the song’s return, a hope
balanced on a point of flesh against fate’s gerrymandering,
everyone’s wish in your tear ever shining
And stabled there. Politicians and clouds
brush the fine heads of the children turned upwards;
a laugh, short and light, rolls down the land,
a reasoned hope in which they turn in the dance, hand on sleeve:
Welcome welcome, bird in the bush, fish in the flood,
futureless presence ringing the earth.
From: The Day\'s Final Balance: Uncollected Writings 1965-2006
THE CHILDREN OF MARAMURES
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