Home Is the Sailor

 A.E. Housman 1859-1936

Home is the sailor, home from sea:

     Her far-borne canvas furled

The ship pours shining on the quay

     The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:

     Fast in the boundless snare

All flesh lies taken at his will

     And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,

     The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

     The hunter from the hill.

-o0o-

from "The Haunting of Hill House"

by Shirley Jackson 1916-65

Her face . . .
The men bent half down in wonder.
Her face was white sand sculpture, with a few water drops shimmering on it like summer rain upon a cream-coloured rose. Her face was that moon which when seen by day is pale and unbelievable in the blue sky. It was milk-marble veined with faint violet in the temples. The eyelids, closed down upon the eyes, were powdered with a faint water colour, as if the eyes beneath gazed through the fragile tissue of the lids and saw them standing there above her, looking down and looking down. The mouth was a pale flushed sea-rose, full and closed upon itself. And her neck was slender and white and her breasts were small and white, now covered, uncovered, covered, uncovered, in the flow of water, the ebb of water, the flow, the ebb, the flow. And the breasts were flushed at their tips, and her body was startlingly white, almost an illumination, a white-green lightning against the sand.

And as the water shifted her, her skin glinted like the surface of a pearl.
The lower half of her body changed itself from white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to very pale green, from pale green to emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home.

The woman was the sea, and the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice waters of the other.

-o0o-

All That's Past
 Walter de la Mare 1873-1956

Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the brier's boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are -
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.

Very old are the brooks;
And the rills that rise
Where snow sleeps cold beneath
The azure skies
Sing such a history
Of come and gone,
Their every drop is as wise
As Solomon.

Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
By Eve's nightingales;
We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.

-o0o-

The new blog
JOHN'S POETRY PAGE
is now online and will be updated on Saturday
http://johnspoetrypage.blogspot.com

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