arts

Poem of the Week: And Then the Sun Broke Through By David Butler

And Then the Sun Broke Through

A sea of jade and muscatel; the sky, gun-metal.
Landward, the storm-portending birds, white-lit,
Riding wild contours of wind, uplift
To tilt at the raucous crows. This
Is how it is to live, the ticker tells,
Looping the floor of the newsfeed.
Somewhere, an outrage; an airstrike;
Somewhere, a politic withdrawal. This
Is how it is to live: the wind blowing
The charcoal of crows’ feathers;
The rent in the clouds; oblique tines beating
Sudden ochre out of a sullen ocean.

Almost as much as Derek Mahon’s poem of epiphany, ‘Everything is Going to be Alright’, David Butler’s beautiful lyric finds escape and a sense of unalloyed freedom in momentary apprehension of the natural world. Sublimely indifferent to the endless ‘looping’ newsfeed that is both the zeitgeist and the daily diet of the doom-scroller, Butler’s brief but richly ornamented poem brings hope in the untameable wildness of the sea and of the birds whose storm-driven auguries yet bespeak, in metonymic harness, the rolling chaos of human affairs.

The poet’s use of colour and roiling rhythms invests his landscape with boundless energy in the form of a restless sea and a sky whose shifting appearance casts chiaroscuro light and shadow on its surface. Butler’s final lines are gorgeously visual representations of place and fleeting moment.

‘And Then The Sun Broke Through’ is taken from All the Barbaric Glass, published by Doire Press (2017)

More information here.

Also by Steve Whitaker...

Book Review: A Cool Head In Hell - Harry Silman

Ways of Seeing: Katharine Holmes And Three Generations Of Dales Artists

Poem Of The Week: Last Christmas Cracker By Steven Matthews

Our Children's Playless Days: Snagged On Red Thread By Jazmine Linklater

Earth, Fire: Notes On Burials By Jayant Kashyap