Opening of third chapter, the poem “Lent” by Jean M. Watt:

Lent is a tree without blossom, without leaf,
Barer than blackthorn in its winter sleep,
All unadorned. Unlike Christmas which decrees
The setting-up, the dressing-up of trees,
Lent is a taking down, a stripping bare,
A starkness after all has been withdrawn
Of surplus and superfluous,
Leaving no hiding-place, only an emptiness
Between black branches, a most precious space
Before the leaf, before the time of flowers;
Lest we should see only the leaf, the flower,
Lest we should miss the stars.

This is a devotional book, not my usual genre, with a poem for every day of Lent (other than Sunday) and for the week after Easter, plus a page or two of reflection and spiritual challenge for the reader. I was reading it two months late, and perhaps am not the target audience, but I did enjoy discovering a few more poems. Here is Philip Larkin’s “The Trees”:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

And here is “The Skylight”, a sonnet by Seamus Heaney, which starts off as a domestic architectural argument, and then abruptly twists to the Biblical:

You were the one for skylights, I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect, I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch,
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open,
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

Sometimes it’s good to admit that you were wrong!

You can get the book here.

This was the shortest unread book that we had acquired in 2018. Next on that pile (if I can find it) is an official Norn Iron publication on The Combined Election of 2001.