GloPoWriMo 2018 - day eighteen

Today the prompt is to intersperse with another poem, line by line, backwards.

Springtide, or the day the rains came.

'ebbing drop by drop of grief?'
    the tears like raindrops that weep over daffodils and tulips
'and how did I lose its succour'
    when the long remembered sun refuses to shed the steel grey cloud,
'the springtide more golden to me than to the birds'
    and the nighttime's silvered shroud.
'How did the springtide not last'
    beyond that early promise when the crocus bloomed?

'about my feet with a silken rubbing'
    grows the grass that fights the sodden ground
'and the unbreaking wave strikes'
    a blow for winter's clinging grasp,
'with its reefs and the wrack of grief'
    the last breath of the dying year, where
'The shore of trouble is hidden'
    and the memories of happier days fade.

'with flood tide and a thousand sails'
    the never-ending sea whispers its elusive song
'and the incomprehensible ocean fills'
    with the tears of grief that flood the spring when
'my thought comes on you when you were young'
    as always you will be, ever growing old and
'Again and again when I am broken'.
 
 
   

GloPoWriMo 2018 - day five.

Today the prompt is take a poem not in English and imagine the translation describes a photograph.

"Calbharaigh

Chan eil mo shùil air Calbharaigh
no air Betlehem an àigh
ach air cùil ghrod an Glaschu
far bheil an lobhadh fàis,
agus air seòmar an Dùn Èideann,
seòmar bochdainn 's cràidh,
far a bheil an naoidhean creuchdach
ri aonagraich gu bhàs."

(Somhairle MacGill-Eain)

The photo is of the cairn at Hallaig in Raasey.

(I know a little of Gaelic, mostly from studying the poetry of Sorley MacLean, but only a very little.)

Calvary.

There is a modern Calvary, where man
Is sacrificed, not just from Bethlehem, but all
Men are depleted.
They move from their native earth, from the
Isles and the shoreline, from the trees
And the heather and the warmth
Of evening fire, to the rain-washed
Bare and naked streets of the big city,
To Glasgow and beyond, to serve not the
Goddess of the land, but the needs of
Money and capitalism.
This, then, is a modern Calvary.