Poem of the Month - February 2024
From 'Dart'
- Alice Oswald (2002)
(Sleep was at work and from the mind the mist
spread up like litmus to the moon, the rain
hung glittering in mid-air when I came down
and found a little patch of broken schist
under the water's trembling haste.
It was so bright, I picked myself a slate
as flat as a round pool and threw my whole
thrust into it, as if to skim my soul,
and nothing lies as straight as that stone's route
over the water's wobbling light;
it sank like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of its weight.
I saw a sheet of seagulls suddenly
flap and lift with a loud clap and up
into the pain of flying, cry and croup
and crowd the light as if in rivalry
to peck the moon-bone empty
then fall all anyhow with arms spread out
and feet stretched forwards to the earth again.
They stood there like a flock of sleeping men
with heads tucked in, surrrendering to the night,
whose forms from shoulder height
sank like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of their weight.
There one dreamed bare clothed only in his wings
and one slept floating on his own reflection
whose outline was a pount without extension.
At his wits' end to find the flickerings
of his few names and bones and things,
someone stood shouting inarticulate
descriptions of a shape that came and went
all night under the soft malevolent
rotating rain, and woke twice in a state
of ecstasy to hear his shout
sink like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of its weight.
Tillworkers, thieves and housewives, all enshrined
in sleep, unable to look round; night vagrants,
prisoners on dream-bail, children without parents,
free-trading, changing, disembodied, blind
dreamers of every kind;
even corpses, creeping disconsolate
with tiny mouths, not knowing, still in tears,
still in their own small separate atmospheres,
rubbing the mould from their wet hands and feet
and lovers in mid-flight
all sank like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of their weight.
And then I saw the river's dream-self walk
down to the ringmesh netting by the bridge
to feel the edge of shingle brush the edge
of sleep and float a world up like a cork
out of its body's liquid dark.
Like in a waterfall, one small twig caught
catches a stick, a staw, a sack, a mesh
of leaves, a fragile wickerwork of floodbrash,
I saw all things catch and reticulate
into this dreaming of the Dart
that sinks like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of its weight)