Sandstone Press

Sonnets to Mozart (4)

Posted by RLD on 27th 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.

Lambing Snow

Bent under the weight of their own water
Long blades of grass fattened in the sun.
Lambs drummed the air with their tails but then
The best May we’d had in years blew apart.
The few clouds we’d known darkened beneath.
Searching the sky to join and become
A wide gusting front that charged from the east
Trailing curtains of rain that whipped and lunged.
Coals long settled in the hearth were set light.
Children rushed indoors in laughing fright
To watch what happened to the windowed land:
Smoke that flattened and tumbled over the roofs,
Trees leaning westward but holding their roots.
In the fields, the trembling bewildered lambs.

Kyrie Eleison in C Major, K 221