Howling, stirring, lurking

Wind by Ted Hughes from Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

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.

 

Last night the wind picked up and howled around the house like a pack of hungry wolves. This morning when I woke up the clouds were pressing down on the sea compressing the light into a ribbon of illumination.   

I love to watch the effects of the wind on the landscape and sky. It always amazes me how at times it can whip loose clothes, hair, leaves, trash can lids into a frenzy yet the clouds sit stonily in an expanse of blue sky.  At other times, the air on the ground is stoic and still while the clouds race across the horizon like it's field day in the heavens. 

I'm reminded of the movement of the Spirit in my life and in the world.  At times I'm keenly aware of its presence, stirring things up, uprooting, lashing, howling, creating noise and chaos and movement.  Then there are those seasons of my life where things appear tranquil and still on the surface yet when I look back I can see the Universe was hard at work in ways I was unaware of at the time. 

It makes me wonder what's happening behind the clouds, under the sea, in the dark recesses of my soul today . . .