MS Collections

The fool-rot conquers
Green swinging forests

O the beauty of [doughed] timber,
A sadist screeches.
No song is of pity now
For the dead squirrels in the dead beeches.

The candles blink
And drop grease tears on the brass shrine:
December evening half-past five.

In a seat near the entrance
An old man sits
Prayer-wearied;
He has been supplicating the ghost of Light.

No flowers are here
No middle-class vanities - 
Only the decapitated shanks
Of cabbages
And prostrate
On a miserable ridge
Bean-stalks.

She shall not curve
But she will have
Stacatto intensitys of line
Jerk-jerking
The somnambulant and the contented.

From sunlight and the too-green leaf we turn
Into the ancient contemplative library
Where a few bald heads gleam like moons,
The same monks that illumined the Twelfth century
Are copying out the masterpieces of the children of dancers.

"All roads are completed,"
     she said.
"A tired time beauty is perfect through all windows,
Her autograph is legible on every hill-head.

The chld's swing still hangs from the greying limb of the autumned elm,
Its ropes passively rotting, and its seat,
One side detached, suggests an attaché-case
In the limp fingers of a doped business-man in a back-street.

In a city of many lamps
I stood
in an alleyway among tramps
the Brotherhood
pitiless as Pity
in a great City

In a gay lamped city They stood
among
beggar and beast.

Be the way of our loving sane
As the courtship of blackbirds,
Or apple-blossoms,
Or a pair of worms on a dewy dawn-sod.

Do you see those clouds now?
In a god-perspective they lie
Like a picture by a master
In a glass eternity.