VANISHED MANSARD: MEMORIAL HALL
No views from here
but always visions
of it high and red
Even when it still
sprang majestic into
the winter air there
ornate and overlooking
all the green below with
an unattainable top that
leaped into so many raised
glances and crovmed nearly
all our final ba.ckward gazes
And our first glimpse placed
a heroic symbol surely between
the leaves of remembrance Even
when we said The Albert Memorial
on top of the Albert Hall See it
was in knowing that as we stood in
its long shadow we were waiting at
the brink of its green moment of new
beauty phasing in on our age like an
ease of shading a tm-rer tenders And as
Verena Tarrant confronted her Southern
ch;;11enger under its memorial woodenness
momentous Latin lifted her
mID
momentary
air aloft So when like the travelling case
designed for a summit or
clj~ax
or triumph
or surprise it burns even noN' backstage in a
decade-old theatre of reminiscences black flourishings
I
of smoke enfold again the splendid day as an abolished
clock strikes a muffled hour Ours it
vTaS
And if towers
. be owned only by viewing with their eyes a.ll they overshadow
then
our dark hearts
h~ve
had it all as our wide eyes have
overseen from '\vhite impatient to'\vers claiming the sky's
brightness without thrusting toward it the red of clay
New
towers are for cli.mbing This lost peak ascended us
