I have just released my first poetry book for general distribution. A great moment in the life of Richard … according to a grand-daughter ‘epic’ … a new word that’s being bandied around by the young.

‘My Word in Your Ear’: Selected Poems: 2001 – 2015

A selection of eighty poems covering a wide variety from the the personal, philisophic and spiritual to the more lighter and sometimes firvolous.

Here is one poem …

The Healthy Worm
with apologies to William Blake

O worm, thou art ’earthy!
the visible flower
that shines in the light
of the bright day

has raised from thy bed
of rotten decay
and opened her face
from thy composted waste

This is my poetic response to the well known poem ‘The Sick Rose’ by William Blake. An interesting follow up on the previous post and the sonnet on ‘death and life’ by John Crowe Ransom.  In Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ the worm (death, or perhaps sin) is hidden from the beauty of the rose (young life) and the rose knows not of its fate. The worm being analogous to the serpent.

The last two lines … And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy … so again there is a marriage where ‘death’ is seen as a lover – all beit an insidious lover … not quite the gentleman seen in the ‘Piazza Piece’ sonnet of John Crowe Ransom.

I give the worm credit in the creation of beauty in the rose (visible flower) and so laud the value of the worm that through decomposition new life is generated … part of the unending earth cycle of life and death.