Making Space

Sometimes, when looking at the stars

on a clear night in summer,

I wonder about light

and the energy that keeps me upright.

What does the Principle

of the Conservation of Energy

say, and does it apply to me,

and when I die

will I be transformed into a thought

travelling at the speed of light?

Perhaps you will turn me on at the flick

of a switch, to bathe your smile

while you nod off over a book.

My light and how lovely you look

will describe a time and place

as you reach out, making space

in your calm sleep

for your lost black sheep

whose molecules keep your bedroom lit.

I will burn for you all night.

Hamburg Woman’s Song

Time has gone slowly by the hour,

by the year it has gone like a day

and you and I are of a sudden old.

But behind my bright eyes, papa,

I will always be a girl of ten,

and you, a grown man of twenty

when you cheated the dreaded police

who wanted to take me away.

I was born in a time and place

to a woman I look like now,

but fear grew like mould on bread

in my mother's love for her slow girl.

I remember the sirens and cobbles,

then waking at dawn by a stream

where you left me with a countrywoman

and time went slowly by the hour.

She who was my mother

died in the Hamburg fire,

and he who was my father

never came back from the east.

My hands hardened and my bones grew long.

I trusted what I could not understand

until one morning you came up the road

and happiness changed my face.

I am a woman of Hamburg

who walked to the hungry city

side by side with my new father.

I have lived here till this day.

Waking

On the octagonal mountain

the blinding, powdery snow

entombs a woman of forty.

Into the octagonal valley

water falls all summer

and at noon on the 6th of June

A child's yellow gansey jibs

above the thunderous pool –

then leaps to a parachute fall.

Trashed

Our culture everywhere feverishly pushes its wares

which revert to trash that will never decline.

There is no respite; every particle is infested

with profit which devours us as we consume.

The candles in churches are electric, burning power

extracted from fuels which sully Creation.

The light by which I write these lines does the same.

Corrupted by comfort, we collude with what we abhor.

When, in the delirium of commerce, the sublime

is hawked to market the superfluous,

that which is marvellous and hallowed is lost,

until we are alone with need, and motion, and time.

The Question

Will you remember

that white-cold day

when you were a girl of three

when you tobogganed downhill

with your mother?

Will you remember that thrill?

And will you remember

that when the sledge

crunched to a halt

and the world was still,

you turned

and looked uphill

at me and asked your mother:

'Will he come on our sledge with us?'

When your mother said no, you asked:

'Did you ask him?'

Now, as the train glides

through the white-cold country,

the blades of the windmills

turning silently

in the white fi elds,

I remember the question

I will remember when I am old.

'Did you ask him?'