Peter Russell Poems

The clouds obscure the island and the church
And the cold sea is streaked with grey like mud;
Dark cypresses (but not a single birch
As in Berlin) edge the Venetian flood.
...

I look from the daffodils to where a shelf of books
Gathers the imagination in the shadowed past,
The calf-bound brain-cells blooming in the dark
All seasons, as the light of a mind illuminates them.
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O blessedness of the ice-ray
And the ray from the sunlit deep

For the sun lies deep in the ocean
Tonight
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Rose-pot in the window water roses
White daughter of dew-dawn sleep-not
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I'm falling slowly in the night

The rain has fallen and the wind has dropped
The lime-trees in the street are silent now
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The air is very cold and still,
The factory-roofs remotely gleam;
The frost has etched the window-sill
With leaves and twigs as in a dream.
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The white body of my Beloved
Is a stone on which is inscribed
All dithyrhambs psalms and epics
Shaped of the winged and holy words
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I shall not be here much longer.
Is it a sort of death
Makes me indifferent to things long familiar,
To wishes and needs that used to be so much stronger,
As I draw my last breath
And the month bleeds away as though dying of haemophilia?
...

Naiad of the weeping spring
Maid beside the ghostly well
Nymph beneath the blossoming tree
Child of Heaven Queen of Hell
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The hares spring over the sea
The sprats leap over the mountain
The peach grows on the apple-tree
Wine runs out of the fountain.
...