Poetry Friday: Poems for the (Post-) Apocalypse

What would you remember, what would you hope for, what would you want to preserve?

Buster Ancient Farm in Hampshire

After last week’s audio note on Shakespeare, I thought to share three poems from a book called The Great Year. It takes place a century or so from now and follows a group of travelers from Eastern Europe to Iceland. Along the way they tell each other stories from myth, but sometimes they tell stories about themselves. The text of each poem is below.

Let me know what you think of these in the comments. Are there specific poets you’d like to hear from on Fridays?

And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to check out my post from earlier this week, The Mythology of Children.

The Autumn Village

There is a place just inland from the sea
whose lulling wind still smells of salt and sun
and whose ground still drinks water and sleeps wet
and dark and loosens under every tool
and gives potatoes, peas and cabbage,
leeks and lettuce, watercress and carrots,
all for the filled soup pot, the fall table,
radishes and parsnips and brussel sprouts,
steam and broth and bowl smelling of garlic
and looking like every dirty color,
brown green, brown orange, dirty purple and orange red.
There’s a place that smells of manure
and compost and where milk jars are corked with paper,
a place of wheels and carts and wooden toys,
corn dolls and carved gourds and dressed-up branches
played with and cared for and left in the fields
for passing spirits to pick up and love.
There are apples in the cool evenings
and pomegranates that lay burst and glittering
in the yellow light and the lazy wind
while pears sit cherished in the hands of everyone
exhausted from the harvest, pears and plums
and round yellow quince with a pinched face,
the land and sky still giving, if erratic,
still moody but still generous, overflowing,
still given to extremes of heat and cold,
drought or flood or just strangeness, the strangeness
of harshness and ease, of comings and goings,
how it marks and celebrates and meditates,
the frozen pond and the song of the spring thaw,
the winter cold and the early-born child,
or falling in love with someone suddenly,
someone you’ve seen every day of your life
but not this way, and now all of it is new,
the earth and air and tree and every lake.
There is a place where there are still people
and they dance and love before the bonfire
and children still spill into the wide world
and they’re taught about the floor and the byre,
the stove and the door, the earth and the road,
the sea and the sky and the smell of rain,
and they teach the stories, they teach the songs
and they are still hopeful for the future,
and they are not afraid.

---

“I was in Iceland centuries ago”

I was in Iceland centuries ago
and helped new settlers there explore the land.
Between the shore and the mountain were great
marshlands where I disappeared for weeks,
or I went south with them to hunt seal, fish,
and find the edges of the old forests.
There were lava fields, and there were rivers
we followed back to the mountains or out
to sea; we named the peninsula 
and we named the marshland and the lagoons,
we named the bay, the district, the farmsteads,
and by the second spring new families
were arriving and the land was filling
with stories – stories of swans by the shore
and ducks in the bay, stories of long nights
and the names given to the seasons and winds.
Where the rivers crossed or where natural
boundaries occurred, land was given
to a man and his family. Hayfield walls
were put up, and sheds for the animals,
and a timber hall walled with turf and stone.
There were benches, fires, and storage barrels.
My home was in the smithy, kept separate
from animal and family, as always. 
There were nights, there were days, there were seasons,
and the ideas only came later.
The ones who did it, they were too busy 
for philosophy, for explanation,
for saying anything superhuman 
or world-historical was going on.
They were curious, and they were hungry,
they had families, they wanted to survive,
they wanted a modest hall to fill with smoke,
to sleep and rise and know their animals.
That’s the solitude of founding, the joy,
precariously accumulated,
leaving the forest to pause and to see,
in the valley and between the rivers,
evening smoke, lazy, from a distant hall.

---

Smith Looks Up the Long Road

I fell from the Anatolian sky
and lived a second life on the middle sea;
I’ve hobbled down the shore and up the peak,
I’ve hewn a home out of stones with these hands,
and all of these years have been deathless for me
as I watched everyone – and now the world – die.
All that I’ve felt affection for,
every art, every thought, all that was new,
I’ve watched disappear beyond mind and heart,
everything eventually in the ground.
But here is a last place to go: across,
across the dead land and over the boiled water
to the island that the whole world will become:
impossible ice, awful ice, Thule, 
where the rusting sun rises and freezes
and cracks the firmament to set daily
into a ground frozen generations down.
A last huge labor I can’t see beyond,
a final huge walk across the old yard
and into a place where I might be allowed
to rest this leg and rest this heart, at last.
And are these two the ones who will take me there?
I look ahead toward the road through the trees
where this girl and woman walk together,
and where they stop and turn and wait for me,
where the girl pockets some stones and old leaves.
Is this why I’ve lasted so long, to know
these shapes going forward in a dead wood?
Was I swept along from Greece to Ireland,
from enormous winters and boiling sand,
was this why I lived to see sail and rail,
the wheel and flight and rising up to space?
Was this why I lived to see it crumble,
monument and metropolis, ocean
and forest, lake and sky and plain, mountain
and river and road – all cemeteries
for every ambition, every love,
the landscape a scattered, broken language
the three of us will walk through, and attempt
to preserve in our memories, a huge gift
with no one but ourselves to receive it? 
Is this the meaning of my twelve thousand years?