Hawthorns, Seen from a Train

A spring poem by Madhuri.

In order to view this poem as the author intended it to appear with all the indents, we suggest reading it on a computer screen or in the landscape orientation on your phone.

All over England
the hawthorns are freaking out
in the best way –
hitching up their skirts and dancing –
in Hag Fold, Farrowbottom Brow,
in Crewe, and every lovely
leafy grass-padded stretch
all in between

White hawthorns, long hedges of them,
or frothing single trees a-leap
above the planned-out,
random, green and breathy fray –

Gesturing like geishas, frondy as flour-sweeping brooms,
sometimes a whole mass of them
like a silky, scratchy, bouncing bed –
and sometimes, who knows why,
a burgeoning little pale pink stand of them,
a mustering of party-dresses,
or sea-shells translated to bee-beckoning.

Silent hawthorns! A pleasaunce, a thick snow of decorous
loving-kindness
from earth to us, to sky, to all the other
wedding-belle sisters
or nightgowned, lively aunties
dressed in white –

Everywhere, all over England,
it’s May,
and hawthorn-flowering time

May, 2023