By Radcliffe Hall:
A Memory
You lay so still in the sunshine,
So still in that hot sweet hour—
That the timid things of the forest land
Came close; a butterfly lit on your hand,
Mistaking it for a flower.
You scarcely breathed in your slumber,
So dreamless it was, so deep—
While the warm air stirred in my veins like wine,
The air that had blown through a jasmine vine,
But you slept—and I let you sleep.
It quite possibly was a gate-keeper butterfly that landed on the hand of the poet’s companion, a creature of the forest edge, as the name suggests. A sung version of this played on the radio this morning: ‘You lay so still in the sunshine’ by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Will Turnstone 