Neil Creighton Verse-Virtual 2017 December

December 2017

I was in some ways a shy young guy, thankfully so because that shyness saved me from considerable embarrassment. My first attempts at poetry were self-indulgent and for my eyes only. Most have long disappeared, along with the brief relationships that inspired them. A few, such as “One Early Morning”, remain. I wrote it when I was 22 or 23. I’d not long finished uni, had no idea what I wanted to do and was becoming dissatisfied with not just the state of the world and the pettiness of much human activity but also, and probably much more profoundly, with the person I was discovering myself to be. The poem expresses something of that and also a theme that has remained as a cornerstone of my poems, my abiding love for the natural world.

The second poem is a little later but still from when I was relatively young. I think it is the first of the many poems I have written for Diana. For many years the only poems I wrote were for her. Maybe I’ve written some that are more profound but “The Love I Have For You” is the earliest. I blog at windofflowers.blogspot.com.au

One Early Morning.

I lie on a large sandstone platform
beneath blue, cloud-flecked sky.
The air is full of cicada song.
The gorge drops steeply away,
past boulders, bright flowers in yellow and red,
smooth, pink barked apple gums,
soar and crack of whipbird.
I know at the bottom
yabbies scurry in clear pools,
fairy wrens flit in dappled shade
and water gurgles and ripples
around green mossy rocks.

Somewhere else, a world away, is a snarl of traffic.
Somewhere else someone blasts their horn.
Somewhere else someone yells abuse.
Somewhere else someone in a suit plots and schemes.
Somewhere else crowds of commuters in dim half-life
sit in trains, eyes blank, faces dully impassive.
Somewhere else pedestrians stand at lights, resigned to the day.

I look across to the other ridge.
The land rises in quick steep climb,
all wind and trees and movement.
As a cicada sheds its exoskeleton
I want to shrug off the past,
let the wind carry away
the relentless search for identity,
the realisation of personal limitation,
misjudgment, mistakes and failures.
I want something better, all-consuming,
beyond the pettiness and triviality
of what we call “ambition”

but for now, for this moment,
I am almost content to lie on this rock
listening to the throbbing ecstasy of cicada song,
watching the scud of cloud and sway of branch,
dreaming and sighing in the sun.

The love I have for you.
For Diana.

The love I have for you
I lack the gift to express.
What finely wrought phrase could catch
its strength, its depth, its tenderness.
So I must as a quiet man be
and keep my love inside,
as silent as some poor dumb beast
in whom no speech resides.
But I will follow faithfully
wherever you abide
and my sweet joy will be
to lie down by your side.
There, if I stay until my end comes,
none more rich under myriad suns.

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