and I’d known love,

and I’d saved some money –

but I could not fly and I made no honey.

Drone

An upward rush on stairs of air

to the bliss of nowhere, higher,

a living jewel, warm amber, her,

to be the one who would die there.

Gesture

Did you know your hands could catch that dark hour

like a ball, throw it away into long grass

and when you looked again at your palm, there

was your life-line, shining?

Or when death came,

with its vicious, biting bark, at a babe,

your whole body was brave;

or came with its boiling burns,

your arms reached out, love’s gesture.

Did you know

when cancer draped its shroud on your back,

you’d make it a flag;

or ignorance smashed its stones through glass,

light, you’d see, in shards;

paralysed, walk; traumatised, talk?

Did you know

at the edge of your ordinary, human days

the gold of legend blazed,

where you kneeled by a wounded man,

or healed a woman?

Know –

your hand is a star.

Your blood is famous in your heart.

Passing-Bells

That moment when the soldier’s soul

slipped through his wounds, seeped

through the staunching fingers of his friend

then, like a shadow, slid across a field

to vanish, vanish, into textless air …

there would have been a bell in Perth,

Llandudno, Bradford, Winchester,

rung by a landlord in a sweating, singing pub

or by an altar-boy at Mass – in Stoke-on-Trent,

Leicester, Plymouth, Crewe, in Leeds, Stockport,

Littleworth – an ice-cream van jingling in a park;

a door pushed open to a jeweller’s shop;

a songbird fluttering from a tinkling cat – in Ludlow,

Wolverhampton, Taunton, Hull – a parish church

chiming out the hour; the ringing end of school –

in Wigan, Caythorpe, Peterborough, Ipswich,

Aberdeen, King’s Lynn, Malvern, Poole –

a deskbell in a quiet, dark hotel; bellringers’ practice

heard by Sunday cricketers; the first of midnight’s bells

at Hogmanay – in Huddersfield, Motherwell, Rhyl –

there would have been a bell in Chester,

Fife, Bridgend, Wells, Birkenhead, Newcastle,

in city and in town and countryside –

the crowded late night bus; a child’s bicycle;

the old, familiar, clanking cow-bells of the cattle.

Premonitions

We first met when your last breath

cooled in my palm like an egg;

you dead, and a thrush outside

sang it was morning.

I backed out of the room, feeling

the flowers freshen and shine in my arms.

The night before, we met again, to unsay

unbearable farewells, to see

our eyes brighten with re-strung tears.

O I had my sudden wish –

though I barely knew you –

to stand at the door of your house,

feeling my heartbeat calm,

as they carried you in, home, home and healing.

Then slow weeks, removing the wheelchair, the drugs,

the oxygen mask and tank, the commode,

the appointment cards,

until it was summer again

and I saw you open the doors to the grace of your garden.

Strange and beautiful to see