A Poem for Green

   Now that I own a real green
    In lanes of sycamore
   Grown to provide a thriving screen,
    I need green books no more
   Than as a background, sere and old,
 A hedge of yellowed rust, a ditch of mould,
      That glimmers against red
Where each bold Walter Scott, or Susan Ferrier, lifts its gilt-lined
 head.
  Old Hardy's winter green recedes
   And Wordsworth's comes. I mean
  That inward sense of green that bleeds
   Into a private sheen
  Of reflective shimmering, a flow
 Through passages of green lost long ago
      And left, as if for dead,
By someone living, far down, in the burnt recesses of his head.
    There there was red, vicious red
...