Its Sunday night as I begin to type this blog and Storm Ciara has been raging all day and is still going. I was driving through foam flowers as I drove back from the morning meeting at the Kingdom Hall. The Channel was roaring away, a couple of waves had already made it to the road judging by all the pebbles.
The storm news from Lilac Tree in the North is that two of their trees were blown down! Thank God no-one was hurt, but the first faller hit the roof of the neighbour's stable, with horse inside. It turned out to be a remarkably stoical and laid back animal, thank Goodness, as Pen said they found it calmly carrying on feeding in the rubble, unhurt.
In the meantime, Storm Arthritis continues its attack - my shoulders this time, and the left knee. And most worrying of all my right arm. I still can't straighten it. Its awful. Its now Tuesday, and I should have been taking Jean out on the Field Service. Its a lovely day - sunny and blowy. Apparently there is another storm on the way
The Oz branch reports that Sydney has had some rain - so much so that there was a report (unverified) of a shark swmming along the flooded end of their road. My bro and family have a reserved swamp area at the back of their house and he says all the little creatures in it are singing happily away now that the rains have come.
I mentioned that I had driven through foam flowers on Sunday and my friend did not understand the expression, so I was trying to remember where I got it from. And (after much banging of both brain cells together) I remembered its from "A Forsaken Garden", a poem I have always loved. But whether the poet, Swinburne, coined the phrase, I don't know. He uses it in a lovely image - the rose petals fall, but the foam flowers remain - the permanence of the waves underlining the transience of our lives too
A Forsaken Garden
In a coign of the cliff between lowland
and highland,
At
the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland
island,
The
ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The
steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the
graves of its roses
Now
lie dead.
The fields fall southward, abrupt and
broken,
To
the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be
spoken,
Would
a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the grey bare walks lain
guestless,
Through branches and briars if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's,
restless
Night
and day.
The dense hard passage is blind and
stifled
That
crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years
have rifled
Of
all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is
taken;
The
rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds
wind-shaken,
These
remain.
Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man
the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were
never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a
sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All
year long.
The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of
scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems
barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever
will know,
Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
Did he whisper? "look
forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may
die—but we?"
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last
petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love
was dead.
Or
they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end—but
what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that
mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as
a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or
the wave.
All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and
the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a
summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers
that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We
shall sleep.
Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till
all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living
to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain
live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll
the sea.
Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the
deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the
rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils
that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death
lies dead.
Probably, I have put this poem in my blog before, as it always makes me think of my parents, just engaged, so young and so very much in love, in Cornwall, in the 1940s. For me this garden is in Cornwall - which was a wild, desolate and beautiful place in the 1940s.
Like the imagined lovers in the poem, my parents now sleep in death, knowing nothing of the years going by over their heads. And I hope so much that when the time comes, and it will be hundreds of years from now, Jehovah will awaken them. If so, maybe they will next open their eyes in a garden on a wild Cornish coast, in an earth that is truly at peace.
