Elderflower
White amongst the deep green, the midsummer air of memory breathes from every blossom. Their glimmering scented innocence swirling the quiet past to life. So that rising above the leaves and crowded faces I see in the mind’s eye my mother’s new elderflower wine lifted to the light. A pale and humble North Country sherry that was sappy and full in the mouth, filling the chest with cool green vowels grown straight from that familiar land where first I walked, then loved, then wrote. Even in the forced immediacy of taste and memory, speech is still speechless to describe the subtleties unmasked by that quiet stream on the silenced tongue. A clear, unspoken and granted magic drawn yearly from the yeasting bottle in the pantry bottom. On the lane to Hartshead the elder trees themselves still live from year to year like a bright avenue of bridal posies a continual celebration of some other-worldly marriage through which I walk each year on my return. They flank my walk through all the years of memory and all the summers and fullness and arrogant innocence of that youthful inheritance. They live in me now as they live in the world growing and flowering and then retreating when I forget them to a mere silhouette in the chill winters when I cannot recall the June air in Yorkshire. But that scent from the lifted glass of my mother’s making is a pure memory of summer made new and the old faces round the table welcome me back, nodding and talking to the music of gathering, my mother laughing tipsily at our repeated congratulation and time stopped by the stirred plangency of the blossom in the wine, that taste overwhelming my present and the bottle passed round once more and handed back down the years to me. So far away now but for the cool sibilant taste of what is gifted through time flowering again in the memory moment to present moment. -from The House of Belonging
So resonant a piece . I was just yesterday watching the dogwoods in full blossom here in the chilly NE of USA along a street adjacent to
the harbor . I was standing at her fullness and wondering at recalling over this past winter what she looked like when in fullness of bloom. The gift of age, at this tender 69 is all this reverie of contrasts that I’m offering to thy self in an almost caricature fashion of feeling into the caldron of a sensoric life and all that’s waiting for me Still on the horizon. Go figure ! A dogwood and David’s poetry on the sensoric path of life. Such a timeless historic piece for wandering through the delicate and tender recalling from our insides.
Oh I adore this poem.Your memories so alive and vivid.
Cheers to your mother and others st the table and your fine honouring of them together with the Elder. I can see that fine liquid golden in the bottle and so well described by you, on the tongue.