Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed
Inaction, no falsifying
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat

To Paint a Water LilyA green level of lily
Roofs the pond's chamber and
The flies' furious arena:
These, the two minds of this lady

Once upon a time there was a
He was walking
He met the full burning
Rolling slowly twoards

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -And you listening
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch
A pail lifted, still and brimming -
To tempt a first star to a tremor

Baled hay out in a field Five miles from home
Barometer falling
A muffler of still cloud padding the stillness
The day after day of blue scorch up to yesterday,

Crow, feeling his brain slip,
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder
Who murdered all these
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood Till he is visibly black

The grass is
To run like the sea, to be glossed like a mink’s
By polishing wind
Her heart is the weather

She gives him his eyes, she found
Among some rubble, among some
He gives her her
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over

Who owns those scrawny little feet
Death
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face
Death

She is struggling through grass-mesh - not flying,
Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of
Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial
Across mountain summits(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)But blunderi...

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white
He decided it glared much too whitely
He decided to attack it and defeat it
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter

The wind is inside the hill
The wood is a struggle---like a wood Struggling through a wood
A panic Only just holds off---every gust Breaches the sky-walls and it seems, this time,
The whole sea of air will pour through,