Brilliant Poetry Article in The Times

Dry days of grief and emptiness

Poetry with Frieda Hughes
Sadness shrinks your world. I know how it is when all you can see is where your feet meet the ground

The Widower in the Country

Les Murray (Collected Poems, Carcanet)

I’ll get up soon, and leave my bed unmade.

I’ll go outside and split off kindling wood

from the yellow-box log that lies beside the gate,

and the sun will be high, for I get up late now.

I’ll drive my axe in the log and come back in

with my armful of wood, and pause to look across

the Christmas paddocks aching in the heat,

the windless trees, the nettles in the yard . . .

and then I’ll go in, boil water and make tea.

This afternoon, I’ll stand out on the hill

and watch my house away below, and how

the roof reflects the sun and makes my eyes

water and close on bright webbed visions smeared

on the dark of my thoughts to dance and fade away.

Then the sun will move on, and I will simply watch,

or work, or sleep. And the evening will come on.

Getting near dark, I’ll go home, light the lamp

and eat my corned-beef supper, sitting there

at the head of the table. Then I’ll go to bed.

Last night I thought I dreamed — but when I woke

the screaming was only a possum ski-ing down the

iron roof on little moonlit claws.

Article . . .

Les Murray embodies Australia for me both as a man and a poet. In this poem he describes the state of a man, now widowed, his life emptied without the companionship of his wife and the world without a great deal of purpose. Yet the man carries out the small tasks of a day, observing each, lumpen and exhausting as it might be: “I’ll get up soon, and leave my bed unmade.” He has no real reason to get up, except that’s what people usually do and what he has habitually done all his life, but “soon” is eventually, when he feels like it, and it’ll be late, because he says so . . . .

Continue reading at . . . . http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-2360336.html