Two Poems for G

Tender and merry.  Other things of course too,

But these are uppermost in my thoughts of you.

Funny and kind.

You know bad trouble, mind

your troubles, mind others’ troubles more,

taking them seriously

but not allowing them to be a bore.

These make for me

your special power to bless:

laughter and tenderness.

I haven’t seen (only with the mind’s eyes)

those acres of heath and wook, free and wild,

under a bright, a grey, always a wide sky,

your riding country, where you played as a child

growing the you I love.  Yet that land

I move through in your words, love through your eyes,

Under that free sky stand

alleys of huts.  Crowded miseries

fenced with high barbs, eyed from towers, stain

earth and sky with their stench, sky and earth

black with that chimney’s cloud.  Squalor and pain

reek under the clear sky round your birth.

Anne Frank lost her breath into that air

just when your innocent steps were starting there.