counting

Tired, as is not unusual for Mondays. Cold, as winter seems to have decided to come charging in with wild enthusiasm. (Though not with snow. It's a damp sort of cold.)

Clinical Audit Training course coming up for the next three days. This will be interesting.

Time seems to halt and stammer in the run up to Christmas; we check the post each day, count the hours, check off another mark on the calendar, chalk up another point on the blood pressure, create our own pulse to have as background to the day, and does time itself listen to us? No. It just goes on.

---

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

-- Philip Larkin

Sun-corner

And again I thank the Wondering Minstrels site, for giving me a poem which fits my mood for the night.

Yes, the course is good; yes, I'm enjoying it; yes, I'm tired.

---

Sun-corner

At home there's a sun-corner
where spring quietly stirs.
Dripping all day long.
Clear drops from the snow-rim,
they reflect both good and bad
in their brief fall, and are shattered.
The sun is a hot cataract.

In that sun-corner,
where you were born -
it's those drops that should
mirror you, and wet your lips,
pure from the snow-rim and
right into your heart.

It's in that faint smell of
spring moisture you should fall asleep.
That call you should heed.
There, everything would feel right.

It's all moving downhill.
Everything's oozing toward a distant goal,
on its way to the sea.
An unknown sea inside a dream.
All of spring's sorrow is heading there.
All thoughts spiral there
and then disappear.

Your childhood sun-corner is where
you are when the call sounds.

-- Tarjei Vesaas