Two Poems by John Holloway

Open Hand When the green hand of the flower Unclasping, releases Its packet of light, high summer has arrived In a long shimmer; a stir in the groves Of olives. There, the dark bole Is released in a forest of hands. They cup the wind With a green dancing. Within their branchy depth The leaf buoys back the air. The air sleeps A minute on the wing, And meanders the palm of the plain. Rough knuckles Of the hills grasp it and treasure Summer’s one flower: a land like a hand Releasing its packet of light.

Growing these thoughts I think of a woman’s bounty, the cup of her growing In a summery darkness; and curse Wide Boys, the Dry Dribblers, Fly-by-Nighters Uneasy at the shimmery alighting of summer Like a beautiful girl from a train. Flower, tree, girl, plain fogged equally for those Who want buttons not flowers: cabbage the rose.

Reflect ion I look for the night hidden in day. Can you, perhaps, find it? Consider The hidden skin-deep dark of a woman In the flush of shell that it makes, So Day hides its darkness in light. Morning Taught, first, the mountains the secret: It folds them in mountains of light; and there They cone and drowze in their wide web, Storing a sombre abundance, the inner Resource of the heavy stone, that mounts Like a force from the ground.

Over the plain The animal bells with their boom, knock, tinkle, Are writing on the mist, and the broad loam Looms under a haze of green: The patient earthlight of spring. A slow Thrust. Darkness built it.

The shepherd As he talks to me, sweeps his dark hand’s Tending over the flock. Wordless

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And still with the big patience of animals, They revert the grass into dark. His eyes Fasten somewhere distant beyond me, Regarding a steadfast night, deep With a rich waiting. The ringless gipsy Who cringes her walnut hand, says Suddenly (seeing me glance at her boys) ‘With him I made a mistake, but him-’ And she touches her little son, and her teak Eyes speak, of a night she recalls Like a lost but landwide privilege.

Can You, perhaps, recall it? Men Who know the angle of skindeep dark In one small corner of a woman, they know The bright of her nightness. Morning finds, In its slow spread, they have learnt, now, Of a simple abundance, unhurried, secure As the move of a season; the deep bell That tolls, sombrely, in the ground.

At my hand as it writes. AU I ask Is a single thread of the one note. Unstore. Thread your black on the paper And the words like lambs into spring.

I look

GRAHAM GREENE, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR COMPTON MACKENZIE, IRVING WALLACE

IAN FLEMING, MAURICE EDELMAN, SOMERSET MAUGHAM

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