What does this day bestow?
Beauty of sparse snow
Whose wet flakes touch
The soil, then vanish

	*

Frost-rime edges blades of grass,
The garden blackbird crosses
The motionless air
To the rigid hawthorn.

	*

London air dims
Blue of a cold spring sky,
Bricks as usual, and the morning news:
But rook and robin tell other things.

	*

Moon golden towards the full,
Summits of pine afloat
Over level mist, the hills
Cloudlike, adrift.

	*
I drink with my eyes a sphere
Charged with light, of rain
On tip of briar
Rose-leaf posed
To fall, tinctured with green.

	*

These I name: swallow, hawthorn, rain:
But meaning traces its bird
Swift between grey and green
Mystery unbound by word.

	*

These watery diamond spheres
Fall, quench in soil
Thirst of all dead who toil
In Hades’ house, where roots
Drink from the skies.

	*

On its way I see
The anew-created
Garden as old as woman; to me
These daisies in the grass are shown, these
Birds in the apple-tree:
Is my sin, then,
Forgiven?

	*
	
Forest is multitude
But one tree all, one apple-bud
Opens the flower of the world, infinite
Golden stamens and rose petals, here.

	*

Ah, many, many are the dead
Who hold this pen and with my fingers write:
What am I but their memory
Whose afterlife I live, who haunt
My waking and my sleep with the untold?

	*

My sight with the clouds’
Unimpeded rest in changing moves
Across the sky: the aged in endless 
Unbecoming are at peace.

	*

All the garden 
In this uncrumpled yellow poppy
Of whose uncounted anthers’ countless pollen-
Life’s infinity.

	*

I could have told much by the way
But having reached this quiet place can say
Only that old joy and pain mean less
Than these green garden buds
The wind stirs gently.

	*

Under these hills too high and bare
For love or war
I live in a green place without a story:
Sun, cloud, wind; beyond
My gate the simple fields that Adam tilled.

	*

From vague regions of sleep I come again
To a cottage in a green field, flowers
Many-coloured, wind, sky, stability of day.
Do the dead, in dreams astray
Seek in vain the gate that opens
Into this world each morning?

	*

In the high lonely hills
Long ago astray: why
Did the great merciless winds
Fill my heart with joy?

	*

What have I to regret
Who, being old,
Have forgotten who I am?
I have known much in my time
But now behold
Procession of slow clouds across my sky.

	*

This little house
No smaller than the world
Nor I lonely
Dwelling in all that is.

	*

Young or old
What was I but a story told
By an unageing one?

	*

Today as I 
Looked up at the sky’s great face
I saw the bright heavens gaze
Down upon me.

	*

If, into this evening as the grass receives the dew
I could step out of myself on weightless feet
I would be with the grass-blades, the dew-gatherers,
But cannot cross
The frontiers of their green kingdom cool and still
In my dense body,
Walking this twilit grass toward the grave.

	*

Last night I seemed in your embrace,
And sorrowing because you were about to die
Pleaded with you from my soul
Soul’s immortality. Today
I wake into my place,
You beyond death, I mortal.

	*

Dear ones in the house of the dead,
Can you forgive
An old woman who was your proud
Daughter, who now too late
Returns your love?

	*

When I woke to the snow
Joy for a moment stirred in me:
Happy expectation of a Christmas-tree
Long ago.

	*

Six calices yellow gold,
Fire-gold one, seven 
Lamps of the Almighty, flame
Today in my garden, blown
Poppies in the wind:
In the beginning kindled they
Burn on.

	*

Flower memory – 
My old eyes behold
Late narcissus’ green-gold pheasant’s eye,
Petals fresh pleated; scent
Immemorial. Now 
Is all my springs’
Sorrow, joy.

	*

June day, grey
Sky, north wind sighs
Ceaseless sorrowless
Breath of spacious sky
Shaking the long grass, the apple-petals
Blowing away.

	*

Lifelong ago such days
Of travelling cloud and ceaseless wind
Sealed my flesh and blood
Native of wild hills.
Elsewhere sun and summer, here
High elementals of the air.

	*

Today:
This leafy apple-tree, grey
And gentle sky where the winds stray
Among mothering clouds, soft
Breast where every thirst
Cools its burning, rests in changing
Mist and air, light.

	*

I’ve read all the books but one
Only remains sacred: this
Volume of wonders, open
Always before my eyes.

	*

Who shows me this scene?
Mother who made me, your past is hidden
From me, who am your present, and receive
The unbeginning unending
Now of rain falling on spring grass,
On stone, on leaf.

	*

I asked not for the good
But for the beauty of the world:
In every gleam of light,
Of opening leaves,
Of living wings and eyes, uncounted multitude
Of the aspects of God,
Lifelong, in what abundance given.

	*

To sight sky seems
At times a place where soul may walk
Earth’s cloudy hills, may climb
From world to world.

	*

Soul travels far and far
Until the worlds are one another;
Substance shadow
Falling on purest mirroring seas, images
What elsewhere is.

	*

World:
Image on water, waves
Break and it is gone, yet
It was.

	*

The curlew knew today
Advent of spring; they
Cry their wild cry
Whose human word is joy.

	*

Soft, soft sound of wings
In multitude, starlings
Low over my house pass.