Colours

I’ve never killed a Marquis in a fight,
Nor led a lovely lady’s feet astray

My love and I in all agree
   As one, save this thing only:

Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
   While daisies spy you?

That dreaming day it was, the bell-like air
Unclosed the naked admirable heaven,

This is where the water hurries under the archway,
This is where we enter the long tunnel,

Gone away, away,
Suddenly at a word departed,

Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

Spring held her fire
So long, the long pursuit, the watchers wondered
Would there be ever an end

Now, when the smoking ruins smoulder low
Of what was Europe once

My little son, whose face I never saw,
Who could not wait to bless your father ’s eyes

Part of me for ever is the January morning
Coming into the Clyde in the frosty moonlight

..The fifth day of November, Fifty North and Forty West,
Was edging to its departure, like an undecided guest,

Mid all these problems we’re confronting
I come to sing the praise of punting! –

Hauled headlong starward by the quadruple conviction
Of lion-lunged engines in their pride of power

Riding the wind, in planetary sweep,
The gull wheels on the radius of a wing.

Straggling off the highway in search of firewood
Past the tins and bottles, through the rusty wire,

Waylaid by Handel’s theme, I think of you
Now half a world away, and hear you say
‘His music always seems like coming home.’

Waking to a diapason in the downpipe
I peer through curtained panes to a curtained sky

You chose a marvellous morning to be born,
The orange edge of dawn, the stars paling,

When you were caught red-rooted in the drain
You wept of course, but did the same again

…Listening,
I am bereft, lost in the mystery
of music leaping quenchless, undefiled

Like liquid silk in golden eddies
the honey laps into my tin.

The young magpie, as large as either parent,
Piteously pleads the pathos of his need.

You are late coming home
To the house we share
An audible silence
Chills the air

The tree-trunk rounds, a fallen Doric column,
are tumbled on the grass beside my gate.

They’re burning Old Sox’s shack
Just two weeks since he died.

A garden gracious, serene and spacious at Lambeth –
This is the dream, the vision that shall be its crown

..You they found fallen, holding a garden hose,
Where, year on year, you watered, weeded, nurtured things to grow.

How name a capital city where kangaroos
stare between leaves, past dome, construction cranes,

Anna is one
What fun, what fun

Spring, at a bound. Once more the colourful chorus,
Daffodils first declare their lyric yellow,

Come down from that Crest! It’s Australia Day, Emu –
We just want to say, mate, how much we esteem you.

Land of the singing light
Light that first I saw
Eighty years and more

With joyless spade I dig the tiny grave
Asking, who made me lord of life or death?