Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

(after Randall Jarrell)

The blue & white of clouds, of sky,
the green of grass & willows –
although of course there’s usually
not much grass under willows …
It ought to be a quiet place
It ought to be a quiet place with
the river redolent as it always is in fairy tales,
redolent of so many things: the splintered
fragments of half-forgotten dreams,
the night before the night before Christmas
as Jarrell said, would have said, actually said,
& the days, all those days after the night
before the night …

Not that it matters – that nothing’s silent,
nothing’s still. The noise of course,
the noise is principally not there
under the willows but in your head:
a clamour of voices, the perpetual sound
of people talking, each somehow striving
to be heard above the rest, to be heard
& understood – so many of them,
so many before & after the night before
the night after …

your stockings lying under the window
when they should be over the fireplace.
A tinsel twist of lights & coloured paper
drifts round the room, beneath the willows.
They’re becoming – the lights & coloured paper,
drifts of tinsel – they’re becoming something
they’re not: the thousand & one nights
of Scheherazade – becoming the fabled hare
& tortoise, a wily fox waiting for the lights
to go out in the farmhouse . . .

It’s the night before the night before Christmas
& this is a quiet place – the willows & river
redolent as they are always in fables –
in fairy tales …