Anne Barbara Ridler poems

Anne Barbara Ridler(30 July 1912 - 15 October 2001 / Rugby, England)

At Parting

- by Anne Barbara Ridler 55

Since we through war awhile must part
Sweetheart, and learn to lose
Daily use
Of all that satisfied our heart:
Lay up those secrets and those powers
Wherewith you pleased and cherished me these two years:

Now we must draw, as plants would,
On tubers stored in a better season,
Our honey and heaven;
Only our love can store such food.
Is this to make a god of absence?
A new-born monster to steal our sustenance?

We cannot quite cast out lack and pain.
Let him remain-what he may devour
We can well spare:
He never can tap this, the true vein.
I have no words to tell you what you were,
But when you are sad, think, Heaven could give no more.

A Dream Observed

- by Anne Barbara Ridler 26

Out from his bed the breaking seas
By waking eyes unseen
Now fall, aquatic creatures whirl
And he whirls through the ambient green.

The sea lion and the scolopendra
Lolling in sleep he sees
Strange in their ways, and the swift changes
Their landscape makes, from shells to trees.

Down English lanes a camel walks,
Or untrammelled flies.
But I, wakeful and watching, see
How chilly out of the clothes he lies.

Easy an act to cover him warm:
Such a lover's small success
Like the heaped mind so humble in sleep
But points our actual powerlessness.

Monsters in dreams he sees, yet lies
At peace in his curling bed;
Blessings that outdo all distress
Implicit in his sleeping head.