I am submitting a poem by the well-known Westchester lyric poet C. Langley Dunwood. If she existed, she would have written it after a lovely afternoon tea with a fellow poet, during which they read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Inversnaid, which, as everyone knows, is about the wonders of the wilderness, the importance of rushing brown streams that tumble downwards in Scotland, and words that spring about like baby goats. For example:
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
Dunwood borrows Hopkins’s opening line, though, characteristically, she has demoted this burn to a burn.
The friend, by the way, wrote an altogether different poem from the same encounter, also composed in Dunwood’s newly renovated studio (formerly and mistakenly often called a shed). I have not included it here, though Dunwood herself praised it warmly. The clue is in the title: Inversnide.
Dunwood’s own poem, you will notice, was written at “my” studio window.
There are those, not many but enough to note, who find Dunwood too self-absorbed, her lyricism too empty to survive hammering. I am not one of them. Whatever her weaknesses, she wrote the magnificent Beach Chair trilogy, and for that I am grateful.
This was the prompt:
Borrow a line—head somewhere new
Every poem begins somewhere. Sometimes, all it takes is a single line to set our imagination in motion. But what happens when that first line belongs to someone else?
For this prompt, I invite you to borrow the opening line of any poem, famous or obscure, and use it as the starting point for a poem of your own.
You can keep as much of the original poem’s voice, rhythm, tone, form, or imagery as you like, or leave it all behind and head in a completely different direction. Be serious or playful, thoughtful or mischievous, quiet or outrageous. The important thing is to let your own voice shine through.
I think all will agree that Dunwood has met this challenge with her customary grace and intelligence.
But enough. Time for us to read and enjoy C.Langley’s Dunwood’s submission for WW3 #236
My Wilderness: A Meditation
for M., who understands the garden
(after Gerard Manley Hopkins)
“What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and wildness?”
G. M. Hopkins. “Inversnaid”
————
A darksome burn, horseback brown,
runs somewhere past the property line,
unfenced, unbidden,
making its own arrangements with direction.
I have never seen it.
I know it only by rumor, legend, local lore,
though I feel I have known it
forever.
At the French window, I listen.
Something ancient is moving through the mulch,
a hush, a green insistence,
the earth’s long longing to be unmanaged.
The deer have come back for M.’s hostas.
She is distraught. I am, God help me, moved.
Such appetite. Such unapologetic mouths.
We take our tea among imagined ruins and are quiet.
What would the world be, once bereft
of dandelions?
A garden of held breath.
A heart with its borders edged too finely.
I have tended. I have tamed.
And still the small wild things rise,
like the dandelion, that patient heretic,
bright as forgiveness, asking nothing, reaching only for light.
Later, the men will come.
I will let them,
as one lets a season.
Still
O let some be left.
Let me be left,
a little wilderness yet,
unweeded.
Long live the wilderness within.
Written at my studio window, in the mild evening, with gratitude to the earth.
Note: The burn in this poem is not a place, not a thing, not a tumbling mountain stream, but a way of listening.
