Poems ✍️

On the far hill the cloud of thunder grew
    And sunlight blurred below; but sultry blue
    Burned yet on the valley water where it hoards
    Behind the miller's elmen floodgate boards,
    And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed
    In the vole's empty house, still drove afield
    To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees
    And build their young ones their hutched nurseries;
    Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison
    Nor had the whisper through the tansies run
    Nor weather-wisest bird gone home.
                How then
    Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken
    Lightning coming? troubled up they stole
    To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole,
    Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair.
    As cunning stole the boy to angle there,
    Muffling least tread, with no noise balancing through
    The hangdog alder-boughs his bright bamboo.
    Down plumbed the shuttled ledger, and the quill
    On the quicksilver water lay dead still.

    A sharp snatch, swirling to-fro of the line,
    He's lost, he's won, with splash and scuffling shine
    Past the low-lapping brandy-flowers drawn in,
    The ogling hunchback perch with needled fin.
    And there beside him one as large as he,
    Following his hooked mate, careless who shall see
    Or what befall him, close and closer yet —
    The startled boy might take him in his net
    That folds the other.
    Slow, while on the clay,
    The other flounces, slow he sinks away.
    What agony usurps that watery brain
    For comradeship of twenty summers slain,
    For such delights below the flashing weir
    And up the sluice-cut, playing buccaneer
    Among the minnows; lolling in hot sun
    When bathing vagabonds had drest and done;
    Rootling in salty flannel-weed for meal
    And river shrimps, when hushed the trundling wheel;
    Snapping the dapping moth, and with new wonder
    Prowling through old drowned barges falling asunder.
    And O a thousand things the whole year through
    They did together, never more to do.