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.

“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?

Ingres drew her
with rudimentary breasts
and pre-pubescent wings
barely sketched in.

On nights when you can’t sleep
I think you open the doo
to the sky

      The sun rises late in this Southern county. And, since the first thing I do when I wake up is go out into the world, I walk here along a dark road. There are many trees. Also, shrubs and vines—sumac, the ivies, honeysuckle.