When the poet ceases singing
There’s an end to everything:
Birds in the trees, music,
Tones and timbre, plangent and deep,
Tempests flare in the mind of man
Foreshadow that terrible realisation
That you too have followed this same cliff path
On nights of luminosity and in the darkness-drear
Of night. Mother, father, lover, friend
Swoon towards the moon in triumph
Or despair. Or when those steps we climbed
In childhood, into the loneliness of a dream,
Creak and crack like the echoes of a scream.
And nothing is as nothing seems
And all retains the insubstantiality of dream.

St Sophia’s Cathedral – Constantinople