Five Poems

Goddess
   The olive seems to root in the stone,
The hard wood twisting down; it is her tree:
Her bronze face shifts its colour as leaves turn.
   See how her robes in time have grown
So frail, they might seem dry enough to burn,
Such fragile metal, flaked and stained where she

   Lay centuries beneath the ground.
But now those swelling folds have met the light
Still blurred with mud which masks her attributes,
   And building-workers gather round
To gaze at her, and smoke, and scrape their boots.
The one whose spade first touched her knows it might

   Mean money, maybe a new dress
To soothe his wife. And so he makes his cross
...