Poetry Thursday - Worm's Eye View by Andrew Walton

Worm’s Eye View

I love to wriggle through loam, my home;

I enjoy stretching through the soil, my toil.

I am not a stick in the mud, m’lud!

I am Worm – earthy, honest, tiller of land.

My band work tirelessly, day and night –

Make roots grow deep, shoots sprout towards the light.

Woodworm, wormhole, bookworm, earworm, wormwood.

This worm is for turning

over new leaves.

For turning the sod over and over

Burrowing,

Fertilising,

Nourishing.

All that was solid, I break down.

Blackbird hears worm’s earthy song

Dances to the beat, claws stamp along.

Vibrations travel through the soil

Earthworm, excited, starts to uncoil.

Squirms through the black earth

Surfaces – to an outstretched beak.

Worming, wormery, blindworm, worm food, meal worm, earthworm.

Protesting – pulled from the ground.

Blackbird puts an end to his wormy sound.

---Andrew Walton (via)

Looking for information on a drawing or print by Andrew Walton (artist), "Garden by Night (Poles)", I found another Andrew Walton - political poet. For more of his poems, buy his books or visit his blog.

The drawing (discovered in an exhibition catalogue and blogged in 2009) is in charcoal and is part of a series of Walton's Nightwalks from the 1980s -

An Oxford gallery writes of the artist: Andrew Walton has been painting for forty years.  His passion is landscape, particularly the landscape of the Thames Valley and Oxford’s Edgelands.  Walton has developed a language of painting that hovers between abstraction and figuration, capturing the beauty of the landscape that inspires him. He has strong form and a sublime sense of colour. Paring down the complexities of the scene before him is his strength.  Working en plein air, he may or may not choose to ‘fine tune’ in the studio. He speaks of fusing the seen, known, remembered ….. even sounds and smells.  Walton loves jazz, and at times his mastery of abstraction imparts a sense of musicality and synesthesia to his paintings where soft tones and playfulness abound.