In The Small Hours: ...And A Star To Steer Her By
Oh for the days when the high branches of a beech tree served as a topgallent, as in your imagination you ploughed the waves of distant oceans...
John Brian Leaver's poem is a valediciton to lost youth.
Atop the nab I took my ease
beneath a timeless beech,
its fulsome girth a mossy lee
from winter's haunting reach
A stilly air within its veil
induced a ruffled sleep,
from autumn's fall and failing light
when furtive shadows creep
Without fanfare a plangent sigh
cut through my jaded lapse,
a soughful wind, its deep lament
a threnody, perhaps
High rookery, full-silent now,
heaved to a lusty roar,
a shower of twigs, their reason spent,
came dashing to the floor
Methought I caught a murmur from
deep within the tree,
a voice, I vow, in sylvan tones
then spoke this to me
'Upon my bough you carved your name
in April, nineteen forty three;
when high winds blew you scaled my tops
to claim it your topgallant,
out of Cathay, thro' southern seas,
streamed Old England's pennant'
At last the wind abated,
the vale a darkling view;
have I dreamt? But, yet, I knew
that date and ship were true
I begged the tree 'Where now my youth?'
A keening wind did groan,
'He rides the skysails far away,
'twixt Sirius and home'
With evening's fall and blinds to draw,
the beech, in silhouette, afar,
unveiled within her leafless crown a sliver'd moon
and farther still, a star.
