Wintering

Folding

These dimensions folding up -
house to be sold, a kind of death
to keep mother in family care.

"Grow up!" shout the Government,

for no one cares but the calculator,
stripping the resonance of deep identities away
as always stripped the peasantry of  dignity
that little might afford them in austerity,
when hungry bankers need a deep largesse.

"There're plenty to replace you day by day;
dignity belongs to dignitaries, no one else."

Oh I'll 'grow up' like a Lear, displaced and disinherited;
but no fault of my own, or of my vote,
that this ramshackle bungalow

(a palace of art and literature
an acre of land that will ache and err -
but no matter my assertions: it is home)

and its secret garden, shelter to muntjac deer,
pheasants, rabbits, chickens, edge of marsh,
will be sold and gone before the autumn's out;

though now the Thornham road's in plum blossom,
cherry-plum; and I pick up from a cupboard
one of my father's journals, read of these.

But I should not extol the virtues of the place.
For any 'ragged pair of claws'                                                         

                                                         
                                                         - and aren't we all
all hermit crabs displaced from halls,
carrying ghosts within our lesser shells -

so know of what I speak of here in several ways,
each personal, each betrayed and lessened
by Government who lines nests of its friends.