Sandstone Press

Sonnets to Mozart (3)

Posted by RLD on 25th August 2010

This group of poems is dedicated in gratitude and appreciation to the composer William Gilmour. Searching around for a theme I once noticed the scores of a number of Mozart’s piano sonatas resting in the back of his car. It happens that I like this music too, although the notion of me playing it is just an impossible dream. What better linkage to Willie though, who can and does? This led to a consideration not only of Mozart’s music but also his titles and K numbers. What might rise from a concentrated, meditative focus? It turned out to be an appreciation of the shared Dunbeath Water creation process, Paul Gallico’s story,The Snow Goose, whose themes of suffering and sacrifice strike me as pagan and Celtic rather than Christian, new beginnings, memories of my own boyhood in Glasgow, a quote from C.S. Lewis that has never left me, that grief feels like “waiting; just hanging about for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling.” Love, sex and death all take their bows, as would be expected. That damned ferryman appears again. My mother used to say, “There’s no show without Punch”, and that takes us back to Rhayader and his spirit bird.’ Now also remembering Edwin Morgan.

The Snow Goose

A shimmer of light ran across the pond
And once again we were fighting the War.
It was planes, not gulls that shrieked in the air,
Young men dying in the water that called.
All around us was a lust for the kill.
Dragonflies, milkwort, swallows in their ways
Worked like soldiers trained to murderous skill.
This we watched from our distant, timeless place.
A huge wild bird and then a boat appeared.
A hunchback who had had enough of life,
Whose life was art, lay slumped beside the wheel
Winged whiteness beating past his bloodied head.
Goose-called, goose led, he lifted up his eyes
In hope a man could die once and for all.

Fantasy in D minor, K397