Belinda Hollyer

ON THE ROAD FROM OXFORD by Frances Thomas

The colours have gone crazy this year;

All the flowers have broken out.

On the road from Oxford, we gasp

At the blaze and dazzle of them:

At a meadow gilded with buttercups,

Or blue with a sky-haze of flax.

But it’s the poppies that startle.

Imagine, field after field drenched in scarlet!

A bolt of red silk billowed out in an Indian shop,

Or haze of pure pigment showered by a mad artist;

The whole field flushed and glowing,

So hot, demanding our entire attention,

As if to remind us

That beneath the earth, there is fire,

Beneath the skin, there is blood.

The author of this poem – a friend  and fellow writer –  is putting together a poetry journal this year. It’s a diary of reading poetry over the year, and when she first emailed me about it in April, this is what she said:-

“… it’s a sort of poetry diary, which sprang out of a resolve earlier this year to read more poetry. As well as choosing poems myself, I want to sprinkle the mixture with some poems of other people’s choosing, so it’s not too Frances-centric. Do you think you could choose me a favorite poem of yours that I could add to my list? No need for the whole poem, just the title and poet’s name, and I can find it.  At the moment I’m just collecting things in a ring-binder – and enjoying it enormously:  it’s surprising how engrained some poems are in your consciousness, even if you haven’t read them for ages.”

I have now read the first six months of the journal and simply loved it – the kind of thing you wish you’d thought of doing yourself, and that you wish you had the application and stamina to complete. I also discovered that for her entry on 18th June Frances thought only a poem could properly celebrate the experience of driving through dazzling fields of flowers – and so she wrote her own. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

And do look at the other Tuesday poem entries.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 5:06 pm and is filed under General post, Reading, Tuesday poem, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.