time is no longer strange

Here's Iain Crichton Smith, as taken from the pictured 1992 collected poems:


False Summer Leans

False summer leans across the dwindling veins:
the crags are wild with flowers and dear indeed
the sails, green-leaved, that dizzy the blue waves:
and pleasant that boat's engine, gravely humming
like Sunday pots on boil. The winter's pains
hang out like ragged washing, whitely streaming.

These are fine mornings when the boats at anchor
ride, freshly-painted, on the winking waves
and seagulls, yellow beaked, slide down piers.
The herring surge into the wide Atlantic
and those, who come with flowers to growing graves,
are caught like bees, within them, lost to tears.

Such music stirs within the naked rocks.
Such waves remember where the dear heads range
studying water in a purer tide
that ageing mouths gulp up the air like hawks:
for now, indeed, time is no longer strange
but walks beside us calmly, groom and bride.

And this is much that, from the dizzied cliffs,
descending late, we reach the level land
where growth as free as this can take our place.
This is a season we have never planned
but meets us gravely, face to equal face,
content to die, nor seek to understand.

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Iain Crichton Smith (1928 - 1998)

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