Philip Larkin first.
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in :
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
( I like the idea of being pursued breathlessly over fields by priests and doctors with their long coats flapping. And might it be a corn field under blue summer skies dabbed with giant puffs of cumulus. How could you stop yourself laughing out loud at such a thing?)
This next one is DH Lawrence.
A Living
A man should never earn his living
if he earns his life he'll be lovely.
A bird
picks up its seeds or little snails
between heedless earth and heaven
in heedlessness.
But, the plucky little sport, it gives to life
song, and chirruping, gay feathers, fluff-shadowed warmth
and all the unspeakable charms of birds hopping and fluttering
and being birds.
- And we, we get it all from them for nothing.
See what I mean about spring? And the birds being such sports. The little sweeties.
An April shower poured down from the heavens this morning. I got wet but so what? I like deluges. Just outside our office door two enormous pools of water collected and people had to tiptoe through them. It was fascinating to watch because no one seemed to mind. Some laughed, others shrugged and no one was miserable. Spring rain has an energy that sluices straight through those mental nooks and crannies where we've huddled these past winter months. Cleaned the place out, made it spick and span. Invigorated us. I think that's what Larkin and Lawrence are saying.
5 comments:
Spring sounds delightful. Never seen it, or snow. But Spring sounds amazing.
Some things are beautiful. And free. No charge. Enjoy.
so how old are you then?
51, man and boy. Been around the block, and what a block!
x
ooh, you're old! I love older men. Now I want a picture.
Can anyone reading this please go onto the ultimate blogger site and put a few nice comments on my post? I'm getting some much shite thrown at me from some anal pricks inisistent on labelling me chicklit girl.
Old hmmm??? I think I've been lucky. All that 50's and 60's music, hearing it the first time round, listening to musical styles that had simply never been heard before. It was something. My generation were the first to have a soundtrack to our lives, and what a soundtrack it was. Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bill Halley, Bobby Darin, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who.
I remember this stuff on Radio Luxembourg, or pirate stations in the UK late at night with the signal fading in and out. The post war economic boom, rising wages and living standards, a life better than that which my parents experienced. Not revolution I know and certainly not what people really should have (the end to inequality etc) but better than anything that had gone before. It's a funny thing but in all my memories of the late 50's, 1960's it's summertime
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