In the last minutes he said more to her

Almost than in all their life together.

‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night

And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad

When I walk in the door … Isn’t that right?’

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

The Wishing Tree

I thought of her as the wishing tree that died

And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,

Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

Need by need by need into its hale

Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail

Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision

Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,

Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

from The Cure at Troy

Human beings suffer.

They torture one another.

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a farther shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,

The utter self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

And lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

Markings

I

We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,

That was all. The corners and the squares

Were there like longitude and latitude

Under the bumpy ground, to be

Agreed about or disagreed about

When the time came. And then we picked the teams

And crossed the line our called names drew between us.

Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

As the light died and they kept on playing

Because by then they were playing in their heads

And the actual kicked ball came to them

Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard

Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

Sounded like effort in another world …

It was quick and constant, a game that never need

Be played out. Some limit had been passed,

There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness

In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.