Stella Polaris: Homebound

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

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

No drums they wished, whose thoughts were tied
To girls and jobs and mother,

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,

If I should die, grieve not for youth
Blighted, and towers of hope that fell

In this dread hour for thee and all mankind
Britain, be Freedom’s fortress or her grave.

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

We lay in Iceland winterbound,
And heard the blizzard blow,

The story, as now we see, was over-written
By Herodotus, bless his warm Hellenic heart!

Could we locate the enemy of mankind
(I mean the GHQ, the Centre itself,

You may not pass this place. Here you must stop,
Though all the world’s great tides run heedless by

Heard how often, still the notes compel
Unused to awe, we stand listening.

Music and the Heart run hand in hand
Naked over the shining sand,

In the summit song of youth
A quiet quick catch of the breath.

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

Seraph my soul’s content
More longed than desert well

Before I loved or knew you were
   I spoke as I had eyes,

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

‘All things are flux: there’s nothing fast,’
Said Heraclitus, ages past,

The host of hills encamped around,
The sleepless army of the stars,

As homing bird the prisoning hand releases,
As tide, unyoked, brims up the beach anew,

…the thunder growling,
And winds mounting, and the sky falling,
And night, and you not here.

As water into sand
As cloud into clear air

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

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

Sweet solitude, my supple slave,
Delicious concubine

Dark sea dark land lie close beneath
The muffling guilt of night,

My nine-hours son, so wrinkle-faced
Wry concentration of distaste
To find your Person so displaced,

The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
The dew in a volley of wild carillons

You spoke, after long years, about the morning
That followed the night your first-born son was born:

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.’

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

My love, I watch you thread your way, and turn
with a small timeless smile, and trail your trolley
unhurried through the gate of no return.

My dearest love, at seventy-nine
You’re not, and never have been, mine.

My dearest love, where’er you are,
just through that door, beyond that star,

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

Now for your birthday the single prunus bough,
by neighbour ’s kindness spared on a sentenced tree

… obliterating in instant mini-time
a universe of suns and planets
with or without their myriad forms of life,

Always a step ahead, you’re eighty-three,
My life-support, contending other me,

Down arches of the years I hear your voice
explaining serials of our late departures,

Six years since your last birthday in our midst
seems yesterday, in this same so-loved house,

For ever is the promise. I will trust
To share with you the same light and same dust.

‘Eternity and time becoming one’
you wrote for Daniel’s one day in our world.

Wrapped in my gown of self-regard sublime
I heard your voice arrive from outer space.

Knowing the time was short
Yours was the instant thought
‘Let’s go up to the Rocks!’

Ten years since that incalculable day
When from all worlds we know you slipped away