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Sylvia downey |
Sylvia is a retired musician/teacher, living near Cambridge in England. She has written for about twenty years now: prose, poetry and music. She has published short stories, articles and poems. A few years ago Piper Ash selected her verse anthology, Signals In The Dark to publish under their Poet Of The Season List. She has also written a historical novel based on the life of the poet Sappho.
Humming Bird Island
We find the island, but there are no humming birds among the eucalyptus
just steps that lead us to the hidden garden,
submerged in goldenrod, red fuchsia and rosebay willowherb,
but still no humming birds.
I come upon a rock and sit; you stand among the flowers.
Sight quickens when the body stills for now I see one perched on a swaying stem –
a glimpse of emerald, a curving bill and suddenly they’re whirring all around,
vibrating amongst the green; a flash of turquoise, iridescent wings, red, no purple,
delphinium blue, they dance and dart, wings pulsating and are gone,
they flicker back again. I try to hold one in my glass, leaf through
the bird book, too late, the bird has flown.
You hover with your camera, frustrated by their speed.
They are too quick for us, their frequency too high.
We never truly see the humming birds, just glimpse them as they flicker
in and out our apprehension.
As usual, we try to pin them down, with camera, glass and bird book.
And so we miss them.
The Wooden Circle
English Heritage removed it in the end –
the wooden circle on the Norfolk beach.
Winched out the oak-bole that lay four-thousand years
removed the stumps.
They took them out despite the Druid curses and the protest march,
the sea would get it anyway,
it must be analysed they said.
What was all the fuss about?
the wild eyed woman weeping,
the hippies crouching in the cold wet sand,
the druid priest with wand and frizzy hair.
I knew what they were on about.
What meaning those stones had,
and once they certainly meant something,
was now destroyed.
Better to have left them to the sea,
Why label signals from the past,
date them for rainy afternoons?
Once tagged, displayed, the ritual mask
has lost its potency, as has the necklace,
kohl jar, terracotta frieze.
In all talk of Bronze Age sites
and solar henge, they never mentioned once
the ritual of the trees, the hawthorn maid,
the sacred oak, the sacrifice.
With all their carbon dating, chain saws, winches,
reconstruction,
they’ve clearly missed the point.