From Norwood Oaks
The oaks that occupy
the window
seem to fan like smoke in the air and flow there
though it was decades and hundreds of winters ago
the first dense embers of acorns in the clay began to flare.
Rivers running backwards,
from their mouths
in the ocean of ground, in a fissured flood
they thickly rise, and divide in fine and finer grooves
the blue-grey ranges of sky, to the trembling spring of each bud.
If memory of summer’s
daring
only left a twisted record of such grace,
limbs increasingly sinuous to autumn’s baring,
and if winter to a similar wisdom wizened the face,
and youth came round
again like theirs, unwearing
newness, we’d be glad a thousand years to call the earth our place.
John Gibbens
