In these plague-times

Ripples in the mind catch a movement in the blood

Enabling certain half-remembered faces

To congregate, swirl, to where smells drag us back

To a quiet, early summer's day

In the Regent's park

The open-air theatre

Is packed with sweet airs that give delight and hurt not

Zephyrs fill the breezes

With a blossoming of intent

Time borrowed, not lent,

Forgotten summer scents suddenly freeze 

This billowing of  intent

A tableau vivant, composed not created,

This living picture of oak and beech and dappled sunlight,

This beautiful canopy of the living green,

Shimmers in this too bright light of delirium

Thunder clouds swarm, as bees do not,

Every thing rumbles out of sight.

This is a world of endings

Clinging to this vertiginous cliff path,

Which connects the now and then,

The sheen of the sea is seen in all its chasmal beauty.

The brightest of stars 

On the blackest of nights.