RAIN

 Francis Horovitz (1938 - 1983)

Francis Horovitz began to write poetry after her marriage to the performance poet Michael Horovitz. 
She lived in a farmhouse at Kiln Hill, near the Roman fort of Birdoswald beside Hadrian's Wall. Birdoswald is situated high above the Irthing Valley in Cumbria. In 1980 she received a poetry commission on the theme 'Hadrian's Wall'. 

Rain at Birdoswald

I stand under a leafless tree

more still, in this mouse-pattering

thrum of rain,

than cattle shifting in the field.

It is more dark than light.

A Chinese painter's brush of deepening grey

moves in a subtle tide.

The beasts are darker islands now.

Wet-stained and silvered by the rain

they suffer night,

marooned as still as stone or tree.

We sense each other's quiet.

Almost, death could come

inevitable, unstrange 

as is this dusk and rain,

and I should be no more

myself, than raindrops

glimmering in the last light

on black ash buds

or night beasts in a winter field.

Francis died shortly after writing this poem at the age of 45 after a long struggle with cancer.

Addendum - the plant at the beginning of this post is the Common Butterwort - Pinguicula Primuliflora - we have them growing in a large terracotta bowl. The plant is insectivorous, trapping and partly digesting small insects and spiders on the soft sticky upper surface of the leaves.