Sandstone Press

Sonnets to Mozart (7)

Posted by RLD on 2nd September 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 Leap

In the back court below were broken sinks,
Worn out beds and pipes the wind howled through,
Disused wash-houses built of common brick,
With drying hooks drilled in to flat-slab roofs.
At one end stood a boy, making ready,
His eye fixed on a gap the young might leap
And how he stared, balanced, on edge, steady,
Began his run with quick, quickening feet.
From windows all around the mothers looked
Hands horror-held to mouths, eyes wide and white
While fist-clenched fathers willed against such fright
That he might soar above the fearsome hook
Land clean and free and balanced out of sight
And not be pierced and held and stuck for good.

Symphony No 41, ‘Jupiter’, in C Major, K551