S.J. Litherland

 

A Day Redeemed By Cricket


3 am listening to cricket. The jovial voices break into the room,
Australian sunlight, and the delay, the unhurried tone

before we hear he’s not out, they murmur on, until the jolt,
he’s gone, before the why and wherefore, and the passage

of play is new landscape, perhaps the sudden collapse,
the scree on the mountain face unstable, boulder on boulder,

the tipping of the avalanche impossible to stop
is geology is cricket in the mind, the end of the game

in the gulch, and so I get up.

Every day a drama of protesting, the world is doing things
wrong. I walk these streets where families once lived,

the terrace houses unloved, their slates shine in the rain, they’ve seen
hard times, scoldings in back yards, they huddle under the viaduct

like piglets under their sow, the trains bred their alleyways,
their brick fronts, their step by step ascension up the hills.

They’ve faced each other all these years, and grow silent
each summer when students leave, like the uncomplaining

servants they are, bought out by masters.

We stop the meeting for tea and scores, good heavens,
our pair are still there running between wickets

as we turn pages over of our city’s sharp decline
and distress is not despair in the mind as Bell

and Collingwood mount the tracks of some far off mountain,
running in hairpin zig-zags of ones and twos,

the colossal effort as the sages suppose
a journey of a thousand steps, and they need

250. And when I get home I hear that one fell but one
continued, and the chain reset in couplings

is cricket is the repair of the heart.



White Birds and a Rainbow
The white birds in a dream of Yeats, free of love,
seven alighting on a tree, sharp white in sunlight,
their wings fluttering like prima ballerinas en pointe,
flew up and around, always seven as in a fairy story,
seven sons or sisters under a spell of airy water,
tied with a cord to the tree, so breaking into the sky
seven lamps of wisdom flashing on and off

I had to leave them swerving and turning, pulsing
and switching, back and forth like sequences of wailing
or adding another thing to an argument.
Why these seven tethered and yet in harmony
like a sentence of haiku?
Seven handkerchiefs
are waving many farewells
and cannot leave her.

On the heights of the moorland, we drove to the crest,
the heather brown as dried dung, the uplands without colour
yet we were on the verge of spring, uplifted
on the bare open contours. I was feeling as always
without brakes in my mind’s handling.

The blind hilltop beckoned the car to slow. Across the vales
was a flat rainbow, unvaulted and earthbound,
its gauzy ribbon gilding the brown winter hair
of fields and trees; it was a silken haze from desert lands,
a mirage of tiny stitches of a gossamer carpet
laid for caravanserai wheels to tread upon.
As we flew into the tapis it melted as if
we were the cold philosophy that Keats knew.





 


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