Beneath

In memoriam 11/11/11

These flowering legions

Cannot know

What glory hides:

Fields of the fallen, glimpsed

Along the route to Rheims:

Graveyards of Picardy

Where real poppies grow,

Transforming each minute spent

In recompense

For those

Whose silence is endless.

Endurance

They wheeled you down lanes
You knew as a girl;

Your voice rose with the sound

Of circling gulls

To cliffs climbed long ago.

You read the borders on the way

Like pages from an almanac:

Wild thyme, lady’s slipper, moon daisies,

Herb robert, old man’s beard,

Hedgerows stained red with valerian,

Fuschia stealing down limestone walls;

You smiled at it all,

Shaking a white convolvulos

In the August shade.

Back home, you labour up familiar steps,

A path you know;

But still, when days lie overgrown

Or clasped in memory,

This lasts:

A song repeated.

Berry Head

The rabbits clock off at six

before the first footfall

shakes

this slumbering fort,

besieged by gorse.

Devonian crags reveal

the scars of vanished time;

and clouds chase guillemots

across a ragged bay.

Waves frisk the rocks

in search of calm:

four hundred million years on,

it’s raining. 

Love's Mirror

I have sought eyes that I risked all to find,

Imprisoned in their sight; eyes that I longed to know

Were bright before light cast its antique spell,

Transfiguring love, which first (and last) is blind;

Eyes that held tears from which vast oceans flow,

Stirred secrets only other eyes can tell;

Learning how looks deceive the trust they sow,

Like ghostly mirrors, fated to remind.

Yet your gaze calls me back, dispelling fears

That, out of sight, the heart’s horizon fades:

Absence cannot be loss where we are whole

And moonstruck distance draws our mutual soul.

Recalling these sweet truths, your glance upbraids

This ‘I’ that, lacking you, sheds inky tears.