The Poem - Henry Shukman

HENRY SHUKMAN

Snowy Morning

When we were nine or ten and used to play
at dying — hands clasped to the chest,
Goodbye, beautiful world, I love you! —
we didn't believe it could ever really be done.

Say goodbye to everything? A gunshot wound
in 'Alias Smith and Jones' could set us thinking —
please please don't die — or a feathered mess
that had been a pigeon squashed on the road.

Even Divinity class, that final sponge of vinegar
on a speartip. Goodbye, beautiful vinegar.
Now, under the shag of decades, after so much
contact with things, it takes a morning like this.

Snow has fallen, a light crust. On the white field
green trails zigzag where the horses wandered,
a crazy scribble shows where they fed.
There they are now, two statues stooping.

All the ewes are sitting, thawing their grass.
Puddles crunch like caramel. Little snowfalls
crumble down a hedge. The silver-birch
trembles with its own twigs' shadows.

And under the rusty chestnut I walk
through a rain of crystals. There isn't much to say.
This is a day that decides by itself to be beautiful.
This field is a bride. How are we to say goodbye?

From In Dr No's Garden (Cape, 2001)

Henry Shukman on this poem:

I must have had Frost's most famous poem somewhere in the back of my mind when I was working on this. What I think happened is that that poem's death-wish got transmuted into a longing for life; or into a memory of how acute the longing for life — for the staying of death — used to be in childhood. Presumably it's a good thing to remember how much we lose when we die. As a child, I remember at times feeling it a lot more keenly than I generally am able to do as an adult; and that too seems a loss.

It seemed to take a very long time to get the components of the poem to settle into their right places (if they have). Line-breaks, partial metre, line-length, stanza size — all were tried in a number of different ways until the poem began to feel like it approximately belonged the way it is.