It is the eternal that never stays

Training rest-day ... after yesterday's Kilomathon exploits!

I just can't resit another Norman Nicholson poem - from the pictured 2008 collected works - this one entitled Above Ullswater ...

... the last two verses, for me, are so wonderfully powerful and evocative: not sure I know of a more heart-felt assertion of love beyond this, and Edwin Morgan's poem 'The Glass':


Above Ullswater

Two days of sun -
A valley in grey rocks of rain.
And what remains
When the hour-old past flies off like a cloudy comet?
What remains, now, in the world
Of stone and flower, the world
That hand and eyesight know? -

The spore-box of the moss you showed me,
Pulling away its hairy candle-snuffers;
Lichen green as copper salt; the bird
That turned into a stone. These remain
Because they are transient as tides; these remain
Because to the world of fingers they'll come again -
It is the eternal that never stays.

Oh but you
To whom the angels speak in colours,
Was the silence singing, and the shining air
Snowy with angels' feathers?

The stones are hard beneath my feet; the water
Clinks its little teaspoons in the beck;
The world that I belong to nudges back again.
But still your hair is trembling in the draught of angels' wings,
And paradisal colours are rising in your eyes.

---

Norman Nicholson (1914-1987)

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Truly, truly wonderful :-)