Poems by Laurie Lee | Poetree

All Poems Original Poems Translations

Milkmaid

Milkmaid

The girl's far treble, muted to the heat,

calls like a fainting bird across the fields

to where her flock lies panting for her voice,

their black horns buried deep in marigolds.

They climb awake, like drowsy butterflies,

and press their red flanks through the tall branched grass,

and as they go their wandering tongues embrace

the vacant summer mirrored in their eyes.

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Home From Abroad

Home From Abroad

Far-fetched with tales of other worlds and ways,

My skin well-oiled with wines of the Levant,

I set my face into a filial smile

To greet the pale, domestic kiss of Kent.

But shall I never learn? That gawky girl,

Recalled so primly in my foreign thoughts,

Becomes again the green-haired queen of love

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Apples

Apples

Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:

juice-green of July rain,

the black polestar of flowers, the rind

mapped with its crimson stain.

The russet, crab and cottage red

burn to the sun’s hot brass,

then drop like sweat from every branch

and bubble in the grass.

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Day of These Days

Day of These Days

Such a morning it is when love

leans through geranium windows

and calls with a cockerel's tongue.

When red-haired girls scamper like roses

over the rain-green grass;

and the sun drips honey.

When hedgerows grow venerable,

berries dry black as blood,

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Town Owl

Town Owl

On eves of cold, when slow coal fires,

rooted in basements, burn and branch,

brushing with smoke the city air;

When quartered moons pale in the sky,

and neons glow along the dark

like deadly nightshade on a briar;

Above the muffled traffic then

I hear the owl, and at his note

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April Rise

April Rise

If ever I saw blessing in the air

I see it now in this still early day

Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips

Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round

Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod

Splutters with soapy green, and all the world

Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.

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Winter Poem

Winter Poem

Tonight the wind gnaws with teeth of glass

The jackdaw shivers in caged branches of iron

The stars have talons

There is hunger in the mouth of vole and badger

Silver agonies of breath in the nostril of the fox

Ice on the rabbit’s paw

Tonight has no moon, no food for the pilgrim

The fruit tree is bare, the rose bush a thorn

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Christmas Landscape

Christmas Landscape

Tonight the wind gnaws

With teeth of glass,

The jackdaw shivers

In caged branches of iron,

The stars have talons.

There is hunger in the mouth

Of vole and badger,

Silver agonies of breath

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