The poem in the rock and
The poem in the mind
Are not one.
It was in dying
I tried to make them so.

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the b
I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase

All my life
I was face to face
with her, at meal—times,
by the fire, even
in the ultimate intimacies

Being unwise enough to have marrie
I never knew when she was not acti
‘I love you’ she would say; I hea
Sigh. ‘I hate you’; I could never
They were still there. She was lo

England, what have you done to mak
My fathers used a stranger to my l
An offence to the ear, a shackle o
That would fit new thoughts to an
Answer me now. The workshop where

Davies thought life was long;
there was a sameness in the song.
Pugh thought it all too brief,
the fruit ripe before the leaf
turned. How is it with you

I was vicar of large things
in a small parish. Small-minded
I will not say, there were depths
in some of them I shrank back
from, wells that the word “God”

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce

Beasts rearing from green slime—
an illiterate country, unable to r
its own name. Stones moved into po
on the hills’ sides; snakes laid t
in their cold shadow. The earth su