The Music of What Happens
We dropped into a bric-a-brac event in East Lothian and I found a copy of The Music of What Happens Poems from the Listener 1965 - 1980. Edited by Derwent May, published by the BBC 1981 and priced at fifty pence. What a bargain as there are poems by many famous dead poets such as Auden, Betjamin, Hughes, Smith, Murdoch, McCaig and Graves as well as some young pretenders, Motion, Muldoon and Szirtes.
I've been following and supporting the campaign by BirdLife Malta, Chris Packham and other naturalists who are opposing the illegal hunting of many migrating bird species on Malta. In recognition of all their efforts here's Ted Hughes wonderful poem Swifts.
Swifts.
Fifteenth of May, Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialise at the top of a long scream
Of needle - 'Look! They're back! Look!' And they're gone
On a steep
Controlled scream of a skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries.Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three of four together,
Gnat-wisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening
For air-chills - are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearnce
Behind elms.
They've made it again,
Which means the globes's still working, the Creation's
Still waking refreshed, our summer's
Still all to come -
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard-stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters -
A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched,
Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades
Sparkle out into blue -
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests, so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings
Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too-much power, their narrow-thwack into the eaves.
Every year a first-fling nearly-flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails,
Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up - then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling
On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage
Nested on a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo -
The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.
Ted Hughes.
I've been following and supporting the campaign by BirdLife Malta, Chris Packham and other naturalists who are opposing the illegal hunting of many migrating bird species on Malta. In recognition of all their efforts here's Ted Hughes wonderful poem Swifts.
Swifts.
Fifteenth of May, Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialise at the top of a long scream
Of needle - 'Look! They're back! Look!' And they're gone
On a steep
Controlled scream of a skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries.Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three of four together,
Gnat-wisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening
For air-chills - are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearnce
Behind elms.
They've made it again,
Which means the globes's still working, the Creation's
Still waking refreshed, our summer's
Still all to come -
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard-stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters -
A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched,
Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades
Sparkle out into blue -
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests, so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings
Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too-much power, their narrow-thwack into the eaves.
Every year a first-fling nearly-flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails,
Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up - then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling
On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage
Nested on a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo -
The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.
Ted Hughes.
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