From Published Books

Beauty was that
Far vanished flame,
Call it a star
Wanting better name.

And gaze and gaze
Vaguely until
Nothing is left
Save a grey ghost-hill.

There's a wind blowing
Cold through the corridors,
A ghost-wind,
The flapping of defeated wings,
A hell-fantasy
From meadows damned
To eternal April

And listening, listening
To the wind
I hear
The throat-rattle of dying men,
From whose ears oozes
Foamy blood,
Throttled in a brothel.

That in the end
I may find
Something not sold for a penny
In the slums of Mind.

I will not burn these rags,
The cast-off clothing of my soul,
In the chill of dawn they covered
Its nude ugliness.

I follow the blind dog
Over the twisted trail,
Bled by the wild-rose thorns
Where he lashes his comet tail.

We are a dark people,
Our eyes ever turned 
Inward
Watching the liar who twists
The hill-paths awry.

"A fool you are,' she said,
'Weaving dreams of blue
Deceiving sky. Evening folds them all
And what are you?

I who have not sown,
I too 
By God's grace may come to harvest
And proud,
As the bowed
Reapers
At the Assumption
Murmur thanksgiving.

Her name was poet's grief before
Mary, the saddest name
In all the litanies of love
And all the books of fame.

Do not awake the academic scholars,
Tradition's hairy god last night departed.
This morn the huge iconoclastic rollers
Blot out the roads where long the Spirit carted
The prayerful dream, the scientific load,
The cobwebbed preacher-stuff of Portobello.