For M.R.

All summer the leaves grow dense, the water-lilies

push up arrowhead after arrowhead,

burst into smoke-blue, hit the central gold,

and then retract themselves into bulb and mud.

Coming round the world, another season begins.

Martin, we have been writing to each other

for years, telling joys, griefs, happenings,

family gossip. Lives don’t fit into letters

over one-half of the world. But talking over that space

we’ve been — what was it Plato said? —

happy companions in our pilgrimage.

You are English, Norman, Greek.

I battle that heritage

for room in another country, want to speak

some quite new dialect, never can;

it grows from my roots, it is my foliage.

Any time I flower, it’s in the English language.

When all the living’s done

it’s poems that remain.

All that is personal, said Yeats,

soon rots

unless packed in ice and salt.

Poems can chill, shock,

Stop you cold in your tracks,

functional as an axe.

But, too,

are a centring blaze in the field,

a sudden positive shape

sprung from the crowding leaves.

Reading your letters’ news

I'd come on a poem. I felt

through the foliage of our lives

(and more than once is luck for any poet)

the arrow sprung to the target,

the shaft trembling in the central gold.