Poetry Sunday

October isn't a month we usually associate with love and beauty, except for those too-brief weeks that the trees are crowned with autumn fire before we curse at the hip-deep heaps of leaves needing to be raked away. Soon the leaves are gone, the colors of summer have vanished, and yet still we can reflect on the things we love ... as in this poem by John Clare:

The Sweetest Woman There

by John Clare

From bank to bank the water roars
Like thunder in a storm
A Sea in sight of both the shores
Creating no alarm
The water-birds above the flood
Fly o'er the foam and spray
And nature wears a gloomy hood
On this October day

And there I saw a bonny maid
That proved my heart's delight
All day she was a Goddess made
An angel fair at night
We loved and in each other's power
Felt nothing to condemn
I was the leaf and she the flower
And both grew on one stem

I loved her lip her cheek her eye
She cheered my midnight gloom
A bonny rose 'neath God's own sky
In one perrenial bloom
She lives 'mid pastures evergreen
And meadows ever fair
Each winter spring and summer scene
The sweetest woman there

She lives among the meadow floods
That foams and roars away
While fading hedgerows distant woods
Fade off to naked spray
She lives to cherish and delight
All nature with her face
She brought me joy morn noon and night
In that low lonely place

I found my sweetest woman. I hope you find yours as well.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo