Laurel for the Laureate

This morning early I watched the

sea-cloud over Knocknarea,

concealing her sometimes as if she were

a table or an ordinary hill,

then revealing her of a sudden

in a flash of blue swords.

I thought of this when you stood on stage,

sir, sometimes an old man

with trouble remembering,

sometimes the blue fire falling

and the jeweled fields flattened with it,

in the field the white flowers wrenched aside.

David Brendan Hopes is professor of literature and language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, an actor, painter, and widely produced playwright. He is the author of the Juniper Prize and Saxifrage Prize-winning book, The Glacier’s Daughters, and of Blood Rose (Urthona Press, 1997), the Pulitzer and National-Book Award-nominated A Childhood in the Milky Way (Akron University Press), and the volumes of nature essays, A Sense of the Morning (1999) and Bird Songs of the Mesozoic, from Milkweed Editions. The latest, full-length poetry collection A Dream of Adonis appeared from Pecan Grove Press. His works has appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, Audubon, Christopher Street, Connecticut Review, The Sun.