NONETHELESS
Words pass through, clothing the heart
clothing a vast mind with minutes and moments.
The view needles, driven down, desiring root or anchor
and an ear or two to echo and echo round.
These crows, sky-ragged, hanging on each corner
waiting the next small eye to glaze a milky stillness
frozen by the glory of another world, now willing to feed
the warm pump of blood in those with beating heart.
These crows know waiting well.
The beautiful road draped around the hills, hardly held
and careless of its edge, floated on the grassy waters
propelled with slow-mouthed sheep tip-toeing
through centuries’ mulch, of wind and mire and dragging mist.
This road knows staying well but going better.
These wraiths, these mummers, these waif-thin travellers-
they do so dress themselves in a passion of centuries
and believe a continuity that failed a millenium ago.
But still, the echoes of it are perfect and enough yet
for a generation or two ( cloud and hill mated
the seed will spill and root, dark and deep in muscle,
the cloud-bank roaring black a captured pulse, a one legged,
one eyed giant clambering the cliff of white thighs,
the howling wind breath of dog fox and his vixen).
We and they know fading and forgetting well.
August now, the thin grasses begin the slide to yellow.
Small birds, smuts in the slate dark wind.
A longer darkness, a longer silence.
Lighter than earth, all the while, these white seeds drift.
A simple skein of wishes, a veil shaping features on nothing.
Words passing through, a slivered door, ghosting towards, nonetheless.
simonhlilly 