Roy Fisher: June 11, 1930 - March 21, 2017
Come Up Come Up
Spring landed in the small garden Brussels,
the day lost to Roy – and a glass of wine;
all the creatures go at it again, the fox stares,
various insects and assorted birds
glide their songs on the turning air.
Listen hard to the name they speak,
a dancing trio of notes – Roy Fisher, Roy Fisher,
projects a green plot, a thinking shade
where that hare, zig-zagging slowly
imprints its paw on poetry’s field-path.
Roy read as he wrote with no show, no pomp;
in Newcastle-under-Lyme twenty years ago
standing with Carl Rakosi and Gael Turnbull:
come up, come up my thinking shades,
see that hare zig-zagging like the shadow of a hare.
Spring landed in the small garden Brussels,
the day lost to Roy – and a glass of wine;
all the creatures go at it again, the fox stares,
various insects and assorted birds
glide their songs on the turning air.
Listen hard to the name they speak,
a dancing trio of notes – Roy Fisher, Roy Fisher,
projects a green plot, a thinking shade
where that hare, zig-zagging slowly
imprints its paw on poetry’s field-path.
Roy read as he wrote with no show, no pomp;
in Newcastle-under-Lyme twenty years ago
standing with Carl Rakosi and Gael Turnbull:
come up, come up my thinking shades,
see that hare zig-zagging like the shadow of a hare.
Kelvin Corcoran