of whole families at evening. Seeing them lying
in the grass, seeing them in immemorial attitudes
of rest beside a river, under poplar trees
at evening, I find myself now half in love
with the hard fact of the ubiquity of labor
in the fields all day, with respite in the happy
pink of climbing roses, the ripening red-in-green
of cherries: half in love with the massed groves,
the long march of poplars on the Macedonian plain,
where minarets are rigid with the grief of Asia,
where gypsy vans give proof some part of all of us
would flee from labor, some part of all of us is
always far from home. People's democracies cannot undo
(or can they?), though they try, the fact of the sad heart
of Ruth, or of the beauty of this scene it is so easy
to be half in love with, as the train engine slows,
and from wild thickets bordering the embankment, so
close one can reach out and touch, the smell of bergamot
drifts in, birdsong detains the ears - a warbled
chook
so immemorially loud I think, Can it be nightingales?
Mark Rudman
CIPHER
Some gnostic text asks
what can we, man, hope for
in our fallen condition,
and though I don't subscribe
to any shibboleths or hold
to any superstition, I agree.
The sages in the trees
whisper by the breezes
