Chamodi Waidyathilaka

“Dream Land
Where sunless rivers weep° Their waves into the deep, She sleeps a charméd sleep:
Awake her not.
Led by a single star,
She came from very far
To seek where shadows are
Her pleasant lot.°
She left the rosy morn,
She left the elds of corn, For twilight cold and lorn°
And water springs.
Through sleep, as through a veil, She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.
Rest, rest, a perfect rest Shed over brow and breast; Her face is toward the west, In the long ago.”
― Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems

“Song

Oh roses for the ush of youth, And laurel for the perfect prime;°
But pluck an ivy branch for me° Grown old before my time.
Oh violets for the grave of youth,
And bay for those dead in their prime;
Give me the withered leaves
I chose Before in the old time.”
― Christina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti

“When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;°
And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.°”
― Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems

“October, and the trees were in full fall. The larch woods were gilded, the beech woods bronzed, and as for the oak woods, well, each and every tree seemed to be a harlequin of every possible autumn hue. Only the ashes would disappoint, their greenery just fading a little before starting to fall. And as soon as the time had come for the ashes to start shedding their leaves, the jackdaw ash on the rocks behind the cottage would give up its struggle; one day it would be in full leaf, the next I would look and it would be totally bare. It would always be the first. All the others would take weeks to surrender to the inevitable and become leafless save for the bunches of keys at their tips, which the wood-pigeons would come and unpick, swinging from the slender twigs with surprising dexterity.
The winds came, and blew in gust after gust of redwings, huge numbers of them but in discrete flocks of twenty or thirty travelling at impossible speed with the winds hard behind them. They came all day long, newly blown in from Scandinavia, and gathered down in the valley.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills