A sky of summer light

Weather here in Edinburgh, continues to be rather wonderful ...

... this is a quick snap of the end of another 'Summer Night', from the back (kitchen) window of our tenement flat.

And - as I do really like that Philip Freund 1950 collection (Private Speech) that I found earlier this year - here's another of the poems from within:


Summer Night

August, the yellow moon in the humid sky ;
The birds fly low through the dusk, scarcely above the
meadow, under the dark ;
Whistle of quail, wings of the uprushing lark ;
Field mice, as nearly invisible as a duck's eye.

Watching the moon mount higher and higher
Above the beech and linden, the fringed fir ;
While the nighthawk cries
And sets the dusk astir....
With the summer choir,
Music of wind
In tamarind,
Rising song of bird, and frog, and cricket
In marsh and thicket.

A moon that now with lofty splendour sprays
The sky with summer light---
A misted, humid moon---
The heat of Summer days
Scenting the thin moist dusk
With exhalation of hot leaf,
Noon meadow
In moon-shadow....
Over, over all, the purer light
Of the golden night, the many-voiced,
The many-scented hour
Of moon, bird, August wood in flower.

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Philip Freund (1909 - 2007)

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