Quotes about bracken, page 10
The Outlaw
Oh, I wadna be a yeoman, mither, to follow my father's trade,
To bow my back in miry banks, at pleugh and hoe and spade.
Stinting wife, and bairns, and kye, to fat some courtier lord,-
Let them die o' rent wha like, mither, and I'll die by sword.
Nor I wadna be a clerk, mither, to bide aye ben,
Scrabbling ower the sheets o' parchment with a weary weary pen;
Looking through the lang stane windows at a narrow strip o' sky,
Like a laverock in a withy cage, until I pine away and die.
Nor I wadna be a merchant, mither, in his lang furred gown,
Trailing strings o' footsore horses through the noisy dusty town;
Louting low to knights and ladies, fumbling o'er his wares,
Telling lies, and scraping siller, heaping cares on cares.
Nor I wadna be a soldier, mither, to dice wi' ruffian bands,
Pining weary months in castles, looking over wasted lands.
Smoking byres, and shrieking women, and the grewsome sights o' war-
There's blood on my hand eneugh, mither; it's ill to make it mair.
[...] Read more
poem by Charles Kingsley
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
You, My House Of Burning Thresholds
You, my house of burning thresholds, come
to me written on the breath of urgent windows,
and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come
with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems
that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses
on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume
of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,
and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.
Come like a spoon that sips from the heart
and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,
and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets
and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind
and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,
and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.
There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,
earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos
that have pierced your body with sad revelations
of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Night Of Frost In May
With splendour of a silver day,
A frosted night had opened May:
And on that plumed and armoured night,
As one close temple hove our wood,
Its border leafage virgin white.
Remote down air an owl hallooed.
The black twig dropped without a twirl;
The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped;
The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl;
A crystal off the green leaf slipped.
Across the tracks of rimy tan,
Some busy thread at whiles would shoot;
A limping minnow-rillet ran,
To hang upon an icy foot.
In this shrill hush of quietude,
The ear conceived a severing cry.
Almost it let the sound elude,
When chuckles three, a warble shy,
From hazels of the garden came,
[...] Read more
poem by George Meredith
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
An Old Bush Road
Dear old road, wheel-worn and broken,
Winding thro' the forest green,
Barred with shadow and with sunshine,
Misty vistas drawn between.
Grim, scarred bluegums ranged austerely,
Lifting blackened columns each
To the large, fair fields of azure,
Stretching ever out of reach.
See the hardy bracken growing
Round the fallen limbs of trees;
And the sharp reeds from the marshes,
Washed across the flooded leas;
And the olive rushes, leaning
All their pointed spears to cast
Slender shadows on the roadway,
While the faint, slow wind creeps past.
Ancient ruts grown round with grasses,
Soft old hollows filled with rain;
[...] Read more
poem by Arthur Bayldon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
November
As I walk the misty hill
All is languid, fogged, and still;
Not a note of any bird
Nor any motion's hint is heard,
Save from soaking thickets round
Trickle or water's rushing sound,
And from ghostly trees the drip
Of runnel dews or whispering slip
Of leaves, which in a body launch
Listlessly from the stagnant branch
To strew the marl, already strown,
With litter sodden as its own,
A rheum, like blight, hangs on the briars,
And from the clammy ground suspires
A sweet frail sick autumnal scent
Of stale frost furring weeds long spent;
And wafted on, like one who sleeps,
A feeble vapour hangs or creeps,
Exhaling on the fungus mould
[...] Read more
poem by Robert Nichols
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
In The White Giant's Thigh
Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still
To labour and love though they lay down long ago.
Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,
And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked
Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay
[...] Read more
poem by Dylan Thomas
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Angry, Smashing Antiquated Croci Like Faberge Easter Eggs
Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.
The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.
I'm holding it all together like an abandoned barn,
but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble
my lack of concern whether it rains for forty days
or all goes up in fire as I've been forewarned.
Don't care if it's nuclear winter, or just a passing storm.
I'm not mining diamonds like stars in the rifts of the clouds.
They can do without my eyes for awhile. Looking
for a white hole on the other end of this black one
like a ground hog with two, or the flip side of a telescope
shining at the other end of the tunnel the dead go through.
Madness imparts a significance to everything I do.
The spiders are weaving dreamcatchers and badly tuned harps
between the antlers of a dying caribou, and here
in this cow pie of starmud I call a brain, the warp and woof
of my axons are hairbraiding dead protein
into straightjackets for the two-headed wavelengths
of my meditative theta snakes. And it hurts to write this
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Tragic Death of the Rev. A.H. Mackonochie
Friends of humanity, of high and low degree,
I pray ye all come listen to me;
And truly I will relate to ye,
The tragic fate of the Rev. Alexander Heriot Mackonochie.
Who was on a visit to the Bishop of Argyle,
For the good of his health, for a short while;
Because for the last three years his memory had been affected,
Which prevented him from getting his thoughts collected.
'Twas on Thursday, the 15th of December, in the year of 1887,
He left the Bishop's house to go and see Loch Leven;
And he was accompanied by a little skye terrier and a deerhound,
Besides the Bishop's two dogs, that knew well the ground.
And as he had taken the same walk the day before,
The Bishop's mind was undisturbed and easy on that score;
Besides the Bishop had been told by some men,
That they saw him making his way up a glen.
[...] Read more
poem by William Topaz McGonagall
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
A Border Burn
Where Autumn runnels fret and foam
Past banks of amber fern,
Since track was none I chanced to roam
Along a Border burn.
The rain was gone, the winds were furled,
No cloud was in the sky,
So that there seemed in all the world
Only the stream and I.
At length upon a grey-green stone
I sate me down to dream,
Till, with its flow familiar grown,
I thus addressed the stream:
``Dear Border Burn, that had your birth
Where hills stand bright and high,
Whose lowlier parent is the earth,
Whose loftier the sky;
[...] Read more
poem by Alfred Austin
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Crane
The biggest crane on earth, it lifts
Two hundred ton more easily
Than I can lift my heavy head:
And when it swings, the whole world shifts,
Or so, at least, it seems to me,
As, day and night, adream I lie
Upon my crippled back in bed,
And watch it against the sky.
My mother, hunching in her chair,
Day-long, and stitching trousers there--
At three-and-three the dozen pair . . .
She'd sit all night, and stitch for me,
Her son, if I could only wear . . .
She never lifts her eyes to see
The big crane swinging through the air.
But though she has no time to talk,
She always cleans the window-pane,
That I may see it clear and plain:
[...] Read more
poem by Wilfred Wilson Gibson
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!