Still listening

Still on the horse theme, a golden shovel based on a line from one of my favourite poems, The Listeners by Walter de la Mare.

Still listening

Why did they wait and never answer, and
why was the night so still, his
voice as pale as the coat of his horse
left grazing beneath the trees? In
a pool of moonlight, cool with dew, the
house walls, lapped in silence,
listened for voices, while night horse champed,
the stillness stirred by the
wings of a bird risen from the grasses.

With a cry, an owl flew from a window of
the shadow house in the
trees, flew into the listening forest’s
dark while echoes, ferny-
plumed as ghosts, sank into the grassy floor.

Listeners perhaps

I promised Kim of Glover Gardens I would post this golden shovel poem in the light of the conversation we had yesterday. I had chosen a line of poetry from a poem I have always loved from being a child and the resulting golden shovel wasn’t much to write home about. Using Kim’s suggestion, I rewrote the poem to make it relevant to the reason for choosing that particular line. I was one of my grandma’s favourites, one that she taught the children in her class at school.

So, in homage to my gran, here is my golden shovel, based on the first line of Walter de la Mare’s poem, The Listeners.

Listeners perhaps

A house, grandma-sized, is
how I recall those rooms. There,
I felt the closeness of family, though anybody
else would have seen the gaps, there,
those empty chairs, echoing bedrooms. You never said
how they died, the children who never grew up, the
husband I never met. You were a traveller
always, perhaps afraid to hear a familiar knocking
on the window and the face not be right. On
cold spring nights around Easter, you saw no one, the
memories too hard to share. The moonlit
rooms filled with bright laughter, behind time’s door.