Day 521 of the daily poems. It is 07 May 2024; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born this day in 1840. Of the twelve characteristic scenes in his piano cycle ‘The Seasons’, Number 5 is ‘White Nights: May’ – a tender and lyrical piece. As a counterpoint today, our poet Fiona Clark invokes the silver-tuned carolling of the hermit thrush on this May Morning …
Dawn chorus
It is a green and rustling place,
small woodland crowds against the fence,
a cherry tree surges, with shivers of white foam,
through rafts of decking, over our quiet bench,
where wrapped in eiderdown, we sit to greet the dawn.
Beside the fence, allotment plots unfold, with tintinnabulation of fluttering tinfoil-scares,
and all around, the blithe insouciance of birds,
the song thrush, triple-chirruping,
robin’s robust whistle from the hedge,
the blackbird’s liquid warblings,
the skylark quivering, far, far beyond,
above blue-distant domes and spires,
and soon from Magdalen tower,
drifting on imagination’s ear,
the silver-tuned May Morning carolling
distils the hermit thrush’s song : oh holy, holy, ah, purity, purity, see,
sweetly, sweetly.
Fiona Clark
accepted by Littoral Press online for the Beltane publication, under the title ‘May Morning’