Five Poems

Houses
They seem solid: render and Accrington brick,
good lines, set angles on a suburb slope
where no one hears (the walls are two feet thick)
the neighbours loudly drinking down their hope.
But scaffolding's erected everywhere
and yesterday these houses' roofs were gone;
the day before, the stonework layer by layer
vanished into dance-hall whistling and the sun.

Foundations turned to foot-prints, which grew back
to moor and coppiced hazel; road bled a spring
where horses drank; and through the Zodiac
the past unravelled on its stick of string
untfl what made the paid-for future there
was merely geese and winter, sleet and air.
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