A Rumtopf for Summer
Desmond Graham’s second publication from the Villa Vic Press, Newcastle, published in Limited and Special Editions, with wood engravings by Chris Daunt (Newcastle upon Tyne 1990: 12 specially bound copies and 200 numbered copies signed by the author and the artist). Fifteen poems, with thirteen of them on different fruits to place in the jar so as to make the Rumtopf, which holds the phases and pleasures of summer’s long passage, preserved in poems.
All these past summers you did not make it,
something to hold against the way
each time May comes it can no longer
be looked forward to, something to gather the petals
you feel drift past your face even as you
look up for the first time and think Spring
has just this minute started. This time
you will make it, encouraged perhaps
by knowing if you do not start now
then why ever? Starting right now,
taking it into your hands, feeling its weight
balanced this moment in the curve of your fingers,
no longer empty and not reaching
towards it, knowing that unless
you take hold of it now it has gone on past –
so this first day of summer I reach for it,
take on its emptiness which will loose its space,
I hold gleaming sides, room enough for summer,
and start, with a twist of my hand open – this jar.
Wood engraving by Chris Daunt
