I've nothing to say today about my past, save
some echoes are welcome to a pew.
One is not, yet will stand,
dark and quiet at the garden back,
at the end of a green trod littered with white petals
folding down her blue skirt smooth,
her two brown, peaty pools,
looking in on this present frame,
this most sensual month
an extra sweetness in the breeze
compounding apple with May-blossom, now -
and privet buds in June to follow.
'The hour we are trembling with tenderness...'*
Helios a fiery ball at my back,
between the sheds, above the fence
set to gallop down the long, late-spring dusk road,
has left shooting grasses and tall seed-globes
grins yet within broad dock-leaves by tree boles
and clasps the blossom in his long farewell.
Webs hold more burly seeds than tiny flies
and wave the white fluff
in the warm wind sways boughs easy.
My heroine's back at her evening task
(Herculean bumblebee) of making baby apples;
and the blackbird sings it all, the light, the shadows,
the heady blooms, the ambulance to A & E,
bright cloud-shoals gathering in the West,
beam-highwayed, sooty shawls on backs,
until this blue haze Prussian-down so deep,
it does for black.
.........................
*TS Eliot 'The Hollow Men'
