Angels and Harvesters / Set Text: Philoctetes
James Harpur is an interior poet with a fascination for spirituality. Angels and Harvesters is taken from his published collection of the same name, a collection that displays both human tenderness and an otherworldly wonder. Set Text: Philoctetes is a new poem. This is its first publication.
Angels and Harvesters
As thoughts arrive
From god knows where,
Or sun breaks through
A fraying cloud
Emboldening a patch
Of trees, or grass,
They just appeared
From nowhere
Among the harvesters
The field a world
Of cutting, gathering,
Cutting, gathering.
Their outlines sometimes
Flickering brighter,
They walked between
The bending figures
Curious
Pausing to watch,
Like ancestors
Almost remembering
The world they’d left,
Or foreigners
Amused to see
The same things done.
They moved around
Unseen by all –
Unless one glimpsed,
Perhaps, light thicken,
A glassy movement,
As air can wobble
On summer days.
And then they went
Walked into nothing
Just left the world
Without ceremony
Unless it was
The swish of scythes
The swish of scythes
Set Text: Philoctetes
i.m. Seamus Heaney
‘You know how your heart lifts when you think of home?
Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy
At first he seemed so pitiful – cast out
on Lemnos by his shipmates bound for Troy
because his septic foot stank out the boat.
But I grew fond of him, and he of me;
I read at night, he hunted food each day,
and we enjoyed our mutual company.
The seasons changed, but we remained close souls.
Then Neoptolemus arrived to snatch him
away to Troy – I was shaken by his howl
‘I need to see my father – take me home!
Do not abandon me, half-starved and rotting.’
They left to join the war; I stayed, alone,
a boarder dreaming of a world beyond,
a small white sail that breaks
the long horizon.
© James Harpur
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