Thank you, Michael, for the link to those wonderful images. Mary Oliver is someone I am aware of, but I have not come across her poems.
Here is another poem by E. J. Scovell, a hidden gem, as in large measure she is herself.
E. J. Scovell: Visit to a Child at Night
Why so still, so wide awake, cold face
And bird-in-bramble eyes coloured with dark’s darkness?
The little light, that entering I let in
From distant turns of stair, draws whiteness from your skin
As even moonless nights from waterfalls
And tracts of flood and heart-shaped pools.
Then were you watching night, so quiet I took you
For long asleep, or did my tread on carpet wake you?
Or do your eyes, as black as new-born, blind
Gaze from another night and hemisphere of mind?
If this is sleep I fear to rouse you, speaking.
Speak to me first if this is waking.
Though we seem met by flood or heart-shaped pool,
By less than moonlight or the moon invisible,
Caught to a zone of mysteries and dangers,
It is not for the first time and we are not strangers.
I say your name. Who should it be but I?
Asleep or waking, you reply.
I love the delicate interplay of syntax, metre and rhyme in this touching poem. Its rhythms are most graceful. As often, Scovell makes of a common experience something subtly numinous.
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