(for John and Teckla Clark) Ours yet not ours, being set apart As a shrine to friendship, Empty and silent most of the year, This room awaits from you What…

That night when joy began Our narrowest veins to flush, We waited for the flash Of morning’s levelled gun. But morning let us pass, And day by day relief Outgrows…

Fish in the unruffled lakes Their swarming colours wear, Swans in the winter air A white perfection have, And the great lion walks Through his innocent grove; Lion, fish and…

Eyes look into the well, Tears run down from the eye; The tower cracked and fell From the quiet winter sky. Under a midnight stone Love was buried by thieves;…

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was…

Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night, A dirty landscape-painter who…

Our earth in 1969 Is not the planet I call mine, The world, I mean, that gives me strength To hold off chaos at arm’s length. My Eden landscapes and…

Deftly, admiral, cast your fly Into the slow deep hover, Till the wise old trout mistake and die; Salt are the deeps that cover The glittering fleets you led, White…

“O who can ever gaze his fill,” Farmer and fisherman say, “On native shore and local hill, Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand? Father, grandfather stood upon this…

As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: The clouds rift suddenly – look there At cigarette-end smouldering on a border At the first garden party of the year.…