“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again."

- Poem XL
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

 

Ordinary life creates

Empty spaces

Inside of me

Composed of God-knows-what:

Certainly lacking in originality.

Pale-blue eyes

On a snowdrop face

Seen-through lace,

Seen-through lace.

Empty waiting rooms of the heart,

Tear us apart,

These ventricles of the brain, never-again the same.

Birdsong flung

Into fond recall:

A dry-stone wall,

A dry-stone wall.

The smokey-smell of coal and steam,

an evening’s desultoriness,

or, a girl’s slight distress

as she adjusts her wind-blown dress.

Fleecy clouds on a dreary day

Don’t fade away,

Don’t fade away

Her tears mingle

With the spine-tingling haunting of the imagination,

That is a prelude to a waking death:

Echoes and shadows of those who walked before

Sitting here on the floor of an  A&E trauma room.

Daffodils lean into a wind of change

Whisper to me: begin again,

Begin again.

An isolated cry punctures the sky,

Disturbs the hush of illness,

The ever present caw-caw-cawing of the brazen crows,

Across the road, in another century,

When the heated glow of household fires welcomed

Tired soldiers home to share the beds of strangers.

And still the cries bounce from wall-to-wall

Echoing what precisely?

A grassy bank to invest my time

No bells' chime,

No bells' chime.