Poetry

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent

One misty evening, one another’s guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

The grade surmounted we were speeding high
Through level mountains nothing to the eye
But scrub oak, scrub oak and the lack of earth

The road at the top of the rise
Seems to come to an end
And take off into the skies.

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning

On the quietest days,
when the sea just hovers in the background
and the light is no particular color
I forget summer,

Inside
 that mud-hive, that gas-sponge,
  that reeking
   leaf-yard, that rippling

Is this the very face
of an angry God, or simply
his instrument?