POETRY CORNER

How many Bluebell springs? We love receiving your poetry, and print a selection every week. Verse can be sent to poems@wokingham.today

On an Easter weekend run,

Enjoying a bit of springtime sun In Chiltern woods and up Chiltern

Hills

I asked ‘What do you like best about

spring?’

‘Primroses, Blossom, Bluebells’ Most said Bluebells – except for Gil ‘Blossom’ he said, ‘I’m a blossom

man, me.’

Like Houseman and his Cherry

Trees;

Loveliest of trees the cherry now Is hung with blooms across the

bough …

Then the wind begins to blow

And cold wet blossom falls

Not petals but snow

The hail assails us in the wind

Small white stones of ice and spite ‘Ah April can be the cruellest month’ as we run through the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.’

Time was when I walked through

bluebell woods

As a child with my mum and dad The beauty covers the woodland

floor

But pick these flowers and their

beauty is over

The fragile sadness of bluebells in bloom

A carpet of beauty, but over too soon Summer growing nettles and

brambles

Waiting to take over the woodland

floor

Stinging and scratching in their

rampant cover

But today I walk to the wood with

mum

To Sulham to celebrate the bluebells

again

Each year our pace a little slower And stops for rest a little more often But still walking here on this spring

day

And mum says,

‘How many more bluebell springs

will I be able to walk this way’

And I think of Houseman’s doleful

lines

‘Now of my three score years and

ten, twenty will not come again.’ Lamenting that, although still young Too few more times will he see the

cherry bloom

‘And take from seventy years a score,

It only gives me fifty more.’

But mum has four score years and

five

And celebrates that she’s alive Walking to the wood where the

bluebells grow

To see them in their stunning show.