BLUEBELLS                                                                          

Glades of glorious wild garlic and bluebells

all around me, walking through to April’s end;

I could not recall having seen such a blue –

not in sixty-odd years – though it’s not as if I’d

looked properly, looked closely, for quite so many;

something switched inside me, a penny dropped,

I suppose not so very long ago.

 

Funny how I could not see that much before,

see that lilac blue, painted by who knows who,

who laid a coloured carpet for me and a friend

(no-one else there to share the scene, not even to

shout about how nice the way, how fine the day);

special because, in all the games they played, each

flower held hands with many thousands more.

 

And so, together, these bells built for me

the foundations of a house not yet designed,

of an idea not yet to words consigned, of a

rare blue name for an unborn child. And then said:

the shape of the house would be as a bell;

that bell would ring once for the clarity of the thought;

and bells rung together would spell the child’s name.

 

The bells I saw were tied tightly together,

should there ever be battles with the weather –

fierce, I first thought, but in the end one-sided;

I do not see torn, tattered, scattered bells – if the

wind blows, they grow, by and large, below its gusts,

its ostentatious, showy, cuts and thrusts that

eventually tire and then retreat.

 

And if the heavens open to push aside and

prick dark clouds to summon forgotten winter rain,

urging it to team in freezing sheets, unseasonally,

uncomfortably, unreasonably, these stalwart stems

will huddle close together and simply shake

the showered drops from off each head that makes a

tiny tent to keep its sheltered bell quite dry.

 

It’s good to gaze across these lakes of blue,

yet leave each bell untouched, for they ring, they

sing, more sweetly, together in a choir,

each of perfect pitch, learned from any other flower

that chimes, in rhyme, nearby; a lone bell picked,

albeit beautiful, more so in a vase mixed with

others, is denied its place within the dell.

 

© Peter Taylor