Description
ALL I KNOW
Evensong
The late sun leaving in the trees an orange-red,
A soft honey fire. There has been no breath of wind
In fifteen days; leaves hang gold and gorgeous
In the woods, and through them the deer tread
Patched with light, wary. The year begins to die;
The rowans hang in blood-red clutches, every day
The ripe sun is lower in the sky. Is this what it must be?
Or did everything begin to live for ever
Before the bite of the apple and the long fall
Into our own demise? Is the worm at the earth’s heart
Our fault, the birth of our badness,
Or is the last blizzard of all things,
The withering of all that is, no more
Than it should be, like a child’s blown bubble –
Beautiful to begin with, spinning reds and blues –
Until it fades in a ball of cobwebs, bursts
In a thistledown of drops?
All I know is the seed sleeps December long –
Forgotten, gone, buried in the dark –
And then is born again.
Taken from Evensong Poems by Kenneth Steven