George Barker, Morning in Norfolk

Misty Norfolk Morning
turning to burning Turner this aqueous water colour idyll
(@ Bruce Cairns Photography)
no copyright infringement intended

As it has for so long

come wind and all weather

the house glimmers among

the mists of a little

river that splinters, it

seems, a landscape of

winter dreams. In the far

fields stand a few

bare trees decorating

those mists like the fanned

patterns of Georgian

skylights. The home land

of any heart persists

there, suffused with

memories and mists not

quite concealing the

identities and lost

lives of those loved once

but loved most. They haunt it

still. To the watermeadows

that lie by the heart they

return as do flocks of swallows

to the fields they have known

and flickered and flown so

often and so unforgettably over.

What fish

play in the bright wishing

wells of your painted

stretches, O secret

untainted little Bure,

I could easily tell,

for would they not be

those flashing dashers

the sometimes glittering

presentiments, images

and idealizations

of what had to be?

The dawn has brightened the

shallows and shadows and

the Bure sidles and idles

through weed isles and fallen

willows, and under

Itteringham Mill, and

there is a kind of rain-

drenched flittering in the

air, the night swan still

sleeps in her wings and over it all

the dawn heaps up the hanging

fire of the day.

Fowell's tractor blusters

out of its shed and drags

a day's work, like a piled sled

behind it. The crimson

December morning brims over

Norfolk, turning

to burning Turner

this aqueous water colour

idyll that earlier gleamed

so green that it seemed

drowned. What further

sanction, what blessing

can the man of heart intercede for

than the supreme remission

of dawn? For then the mind

looking backward upon its

too sullied yesterday,

the rotting stack of

resolution and refuse,

reads in the rainbowed sky

a greater covenant,

the tremendous pronouncement:

the day forgives.

Holy the heart in

its proper occupation

praising and appraising this

godsend, the dawn.

Will you lift up your eyes

my blind spirit and see

such evidence of

forgiveness in the heavens

morning after golden

morning than even

the blind can see?

(source: Poem Hunter)

I have searched and searched in this poem, line by line, for a misplaced word, an awkward phrase, anything that is not earthly perfection (Susan Williams)



(George Barker)