Horse Chestnut Poems, II

The Horse Chestnut

In May the long and dipping leaves flock
gloriously along the supple branches,
thin and translucent and dark and cool
and veined in lightly threading cords;
and clusters of white pink-specked blossoms
rise in thick and heavy spires on stems
tenderly and freshly green,
beset upon by hordes of bees
who render the magnificent dome
into one great leafy, lovely hive.

In the earth, there sunken lie
the tarnished sombre chestnut hulls
which fell as copper-tinted paeans
to the whorled charm of gleaming wood
and now in death return to dust
or sprout a lingering greyish stem
which a lightless neighbourhood will starve
or which a fortuitous sunlit orifice
will raise and cherish into life.

For now the deep Elysian shadows
spread among the cobblestones
and touch the abandoned windows
high in doors of the archaic stables,
guard from view the burdening growth
of a persistent English ivy
whilst it crowns, as if a laurel,
the crumbling, swallow-harbouring brick.

At a distance and yet in sight,
stranded on the crest of fields
that dive and rise into the hedges
and bathe their feet in unseen rills,
a kindred tree casts far its foliage
in a lonely but grand clump:
a watcher of the meadows
and the shelterer of the horses
when, their loping gambols ended,
and finding the sun's orb too fierce,
they canter flowingly to bask
in the arbour's chilly sanctuary.

***
[Second Version, April 14th, 2009, rev. Oct. 20th and Nov. 25th]

[The other horse chestnut poem is here.]