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Tag Archives: Mike Harding

Singing, Spring and Sunflowers, A Poem

We learned a new piece at choir yesterday and it was so joyful, I thought you might like to hear it. The music is by Mozart.

Our Spring border lifts the spirits.

Mike Harding published this poem on Facebook yesterday and I asked if I could share it here to which he replied, “Yes, of course.” So, here it is, not really feeling like a rough draft to me. I posted a story about Ukraine and sunflowers a couple of weeks ago,Click this link to read it.

“The first, very rough draft of a new poem

Sunflowers

A shaky phone-cam filmed it all and so

The whole world sees a peasant woman finding

Strangers in her land do what peasants always do

For strangers as she ignores the guns and stands

Four square and strong and offers them a gift,

Those soldiers with their guns and bandoliers,

Grenades and wire cutters, their killing knives.

Their helmets and their gibbering headsets.

She holds out to them her gift: handfuls

Fistfuls of sunflower seeds, little pods of grace

And welcome. It is the way with peasant people

Everywhere, even in this day of days,

For those who have the least will always give the most.

But the seeds came wrapped in words,

These words,

“Keep them in your pockets boys so, when we bury

You in Ukraine’s soil, sunflowers will climb from

Your graves toward the blue sky of the truth:

Here take them, they are good, I harvested them last year.

Take them so that the flowers will be a monument to

The murdered children and the families

You bombed out of their homes; the flowers

Will stretch their golden faces to the sky

And in the night the flowers will whisper

Softly to the wind, ‘Here lie the murderers

That came out of the East, unwelcome and unwanted,

Destroyers of beauty, carriers of madness,

Cursed for all eternity.’

The fields of flowers will drop their seeds

Each year so that those to come will understand

Their stories, stronger than granite,

More beautiful than marble,

These sunflowers will tell the world

How your young lives were wasted here

On our rich soil made richer by your bones

And flesh, and your own mothers will come

Throughout the empty years

To water with their salty tears

The endless fields of flower heads,

Golden, turning in the sun.”

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Posted by mybeautfulthings on March 16, 2022 in music, nature, Peace, Photography, poetry, Postaday2022, Uncategorized

Tags: Mike Harding, Ukraine

Resting, Waiting and A Mike Harding Poem

20 Oct

It’s been a quiet, stay-at-home, curl-up-with-a-good-book, rest-after-hectic-holiday sort of a day while Storm Brian begins to make its way across Britain, starting with us in the South West.

I saw this in Tiger in North Finchley on Wednesday and it made me laugh so I had to buy it. I do cook with Tarragon too.

Here is a brilliant poem by Mike Harding for you that came my way yesterday and which touched a chord.

One Swallow

Remember how you’d drive at night in summers past
Through fogs and mists of midges,
Blizzards of fat bugs, snowstorms of moths
All melting on the windscreen glass?
Long, hot, country miles, you’d drive
Dry eyed and squinting out into the dark, cursing,
The windscreen frosted with their last moments,
The wipers useless, washer water gone.
You’d get back home to find the hurl and heft
And spatter, the great smears of death,
The legions lost, all dashed and hurtled to their end –
Guts, brains and wings, thorax and antennae –
Pulped into a patina you’d have to soap and scour away.

But Death comes easy for them now, no battering
Oblivion at seventy miles an hour, head on,
Just the toxic rain of money slathered across
The meadows, hills and downs.
One swallow makes a summer now;
Soon she’ll be gone too with the bees,
The birdsong and the riotous great clamour
That once welcomed every dawn.
And, as we face each silent year
And see the dustbowl fells and fields,
We’ll weep for what we all have lost:
For clouds of midges, nights alive with moths,
The scimitars of swallows, martins, swifts,
The wrens and sparrows, nightingales and jays
And the chanting birds that caroled once
All across those golden, summer days.