Plea to the Wind

Alice Oswald

Describe the Wind, 

                        Wind!

Say something marked by discomfort

That wanders many cities and harbours,

Not knowing the langauge.

Be much travelled.

Start with nothing but the hair blown sideways

And say:

            Gentle

                       South-easterly

                                  Drift

                       With Rain.

Say: Downdraught.

Unglue the flog from the woods from the waist up

And speak disparagingly of leaves.

Be an old man blowing a shell.

Blow over the glumness of a girl

Looking up at the air in her red hood

And say:

                         Suddenly

                                     Violent

                                          Short-lived

                                     Gust.

Then come down glittering

With a pair of ducks to rooftop.

Go on. Be North-easterly.

Be enough chill to ripple a pool.

Be a rumour of winter.

Whip the green cloth off the hills

And keep on quietly

Lifting the skirts of women not wanting to be startled

And pushing clouds like towers of clean linen

Till you get to the

                         Thin

                              Cry

                         That 

                              Suffers

                 On seas.

Ignore it.

Say Snow.

Say Ditto.

Wait for five days

In which everything fades except aging.

Then try to describe being followed by heavy rain.

Describe voices and silverings,

Say:

           Strong

              Wet

       Southwester

From December to March.

Describe everything leaning.

Bring a tray of cool air to the back door.

Speak increasingly rustlingly.

Say something winged

Om the branch of the heart.

Say:

               Song.

Beacsue you know these things.

You are both Breath

             And Breath

And your mouth mentions me

Just at the point where I end.

                                                                                                     

Hymn to Iris

Alice Oswald

Quick moving goddess of the rainbow

You whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-through

Put your hands

Put your heaven-taken shape down

On the ground. Now. Anywhere

Like a bent down bough of nothing

A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin air

And let there be instantly in its underlight —

At street corners, on swings, out of car windows —

A three-moment blessing for all bridges

May impossible rifts be often delicately crossed

By bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plank

May the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over

On flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain

And bridges of see-through stone, the living-space drips and echoes

May two fields be bridged by a stile

And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance

And may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,

Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing

Evening Poem
Alice Oswald


Old scrap-iron foxgloves
rusty rods of the broken woods

what a faded knocked-out stiffness
as if you'd sprung from the horsehair
        of a whole Victorian sofa buried in the mud down there

or at any rate something dropped from a great height
straight through flesh and out the other side
has left your casing pale and loose and finally

just a heap of shoes

they say the gods being so uplifted
can't really walk on feet but take tottering steps
and lean like this closer and closer to the ground
                              which gods?

it is the hours on bird-thin legs
the same old choirs of hours
returning their summer clothes to the earth

with the night now
as if dropped from a great height

falling

Wedding
Alice Oswald


From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it's like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it's like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it's like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions...
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it's like a toe
tiptoeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it's like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.