Night Song

Night Song

Stack the cups and clear away;

The bonfire sinks to ash;

Daytime is so much trash,

Night climbs the stairway.

We have done what we can to use the light,

Cricket and jar take over;

Children snore, the smell of clover

Tickles the poacher's nose as he treads it over.

Poppy and rose swim in the warm remainder,

Exhausted current of day;

Cold comes down from the air, hay

Hears warm in the field what the lovers say.

Bare to the teeming black the heady tree

Sighs in its sleep and stirs;

Softly an owl-wing whirrs,

The water chuckles, the paper-beetle burrs.

Stack the cups and clear away;

The bonfire sinks to ash;

Daytime is so much trash,

Night climbs the stairway.

-David Holbrook

I lifted that picture of David Holbrook from a rather lovely obituary of him in The Guardian. He died in 2011 at the good age of 88. He was a teacher and D-Day veteran as well as a quite prolific author--plays, memoirs, novels, as well as poetry.

As I had to Google some to figure it out, it might help you, too: jar in the second stanza will be a nightjar, a medium-sized insect-eating bird of the same family as what's called a nighthawk in North America.

Appropriate that I'm posting 'Night Song' at the very end of the day...