Sandstone Press

Sonnets to Mozart (5)

Posted by RLD on 29th 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.

Requiem

Solace taken from everyday things,
I pick up a pebble and hold it tight.
What is it that the tide goes out and in?
The human heart flies on in love with life.
Birds perform their casual tricks with sound
In hedgerows thick with budded leaves and sap.
I am saying goodbye to an old friend,
On a fine spring day I follow her path.
These are the birds and trees she loved and left,
The grebes and greylags, silver birches, pines,
Their ways and seeds that bend across the earth.
The sun behind the birch makes shadow lines.
Where skylarks sing in mockery of death
I think about the pebble, about time.

Requiem in D minor, K626