The Release
The scaffolding has gone. The sky is there! hard cold high clear and blue.
Clanking poles and thudding planks were the music of a strip-down that
let light through
At last, hammered the cage door off its hinges, banged its goodbye to the
bantering dusty brickie crew,
Left us this rosy cliff-face telling the tentative sun it is almost as good as new.
So now that we are so scoured and open and clean, what shall we do?
There is so much to say
And who can delay
When some are lost and some are seen, our dearest heads, and to those and
to these we must still answer and be true.
from A Book of Lives (Carcanet, 2007)
