‘1939’ and Other Poems

1939

The glazier’s boy waits numbly with a bucket.
Workmen are plugging the sky-blue gaps
in a praying knight’s armour with tar-paper;
are coming, armed with clippers and callipers,
to the north-west transept to gently
behead a line of pale-faced prelates.

Later, the boy sees silhouette-black
blur at its edges, fags floating on the scaffold.
The smithereened prophets are to be kept
underground in numbered boxes – five, six,
ten years, more, and dug up unwithered.



Winter Sonnet

Now shadows have lengthened and sun
peeps into faces at such a sharp angle
burnt eyes can’t make out the western
land in the afternoon, east in the morning
...