St Mary's Church, Southampton
An early summer's day:
so spring green, a remnant
memory of someone:
over the tussocked grass,
some flint wall mottled
and ingrained with trees,
an everlasting day turned
and still turned again.
Days fail too easily now.
You are gone, your name
has been forgotten, the place
is mingled with the years.
And here, below St. Mary's
old inner-city pastoral,
light is codified - compressed
by winter into sound.
Still the spire is ticking
its second hand across
the lowered sky. Starlings
gather like forgotten years:
pursued by cold sunsets:
crystalized into song.
