The Poetry Project

This month's theme is all about Halloween and scary poems. I'm going to stretch the boundaries of that just a tad. As I type this, there's a crazy cold wind howling here in Minnesota, making the house creak and shift, knocking over unsecured things outside (thank goodness it's not my garbage and recycling pickup day). So for my creepy poem, I'm choosing one by Ted Hughes:

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Comments

[Lu]

What a good way to run with the theme. I love this poem. Thank you for sharing!

[Snowball]

This poem truly evokes a wicked storm. Wonderful.

[Kristin]

That last stanza is so evocative of that moment during a storm when you're sure the house is about to go. Thanks for sharing!

[Amy Rea]

Thanks, Lu and Snowball! I love this poem.

[Amy Rea]

Thanks, Kristin!

[Jeanne]

That's one of the best first lines in all poetry. When the wind howls, I often think of the house being "out at sea."

[Amy Rea]

That is exactly how it sounds, Jeanne. And it sounds like that again today.

[urdu poetry]

This poem truly Wonderful.