Y is for Yearning.....and Yeats

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

I don't think I can get up the nerve required to summarise Yeats in two lines.  

I was introduced to Yeats as a child by a slightly older, teenager friend; the first poem I read was For Anne Gregory, and I still remember it verbatim. Yeats - so uber fab that Yeatsian is an adjective.  So utterly captivating as to be beyond description. Such a Maestro of Maestros that when he died Auden wrote - 'Earth, receive an honoured guest/William Yeats is laid to rest.'

There are a hundred favourites, but today it's his The Lake Isle of Innisfree that's the prompt.

Making Peace

I would leave, go to some deserted nook

- maybe an unknown, old mansabdar’s* tomb

tumbled stones now beside a dried-up brook

and build nothing there, just find some room

and sit below the small dome where pigeons

fill afternoons with their iridescent throats;

and conflicts recede, greed and need, religions,

images of screaming children in some remote

city but close enough to scorch tears dry.

Dusk drops there a broken dragonfly wing

tender and translucent. The light leaps high

in a flaming mauve, a last, frantic fling.

* a military official in the Indian Mughal court (1527-1857)

Would you have to leave if you wanted some peace and quiet?  Or are you okay right where you are, like me, panicking sometimes but then calming down with a bit of Yeats and managing to get back on track? :) One more and it's done!!  

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2015