Sandstone Press

Sonnets to Mozart (8)

Posted by RLD on 4th 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.

Windows

Now to recall this early memory
Of ‘fifties Ibrox. I was a small boy
With his face pressed against a shop window
And lost there, in a Neverland of toys.
His huge hand slipped mine and he walked away
Without me knowing. The world took a turn
When I pulled back from the glass, his God’s shape
Rushed out of me and was lost. A void formed.
Through the window time runs the other way.
Now see me lying in a bedded ward
In old age, stirring and wakening there,
Staring at the window and far beyond,
Calling at the top of my tiny voice,
‘Wait for me, Daddy’, then following on.

Two Little Fugues in E Flat Major and G Minor, K154a