I’ve mentioned the poet Alice Oswald a couple of times as one of the remarkable talents of our time. Another is Kathleen Jamie of Scotland.
I love her poem “The Stags.” It begins:
This is the multitude, the beasts
you wanted to show me, drawing me
upstream, all morning up through wind-
scoured heather to the hillcrest.
The poet looks at the herd, somber
like the signatories of a covenant;
and heavily antlered,
like masts in a harbor, or city spires.
It’s a breathtaking sight, and she wonders why her companion dragged her that long way to see it.
I suspect you’d
hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight
our shared country, lead me deeper
into what you know, but loath
to cause fear you’re already moving
quietly away, sure I’ll go with you,
as I would now, almost anywhere.
In an earlier life, I held on to a job longer than I should have to be near a wilderness in East Texas. I spent every free day in the woods.
One day, when I found a remarkable woman, I asked her if I could show her those deep, beautiful woods. It still astonishes me, decades later, that she said yes.
• Source: The full poem is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55800/the-stags
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