Just for a moment then as you raised your book –
it must have been the way your glasses looked
above the round red cheeks – as you poured out
the psalm’s grim music from a pulsing throat,
that moment, as I say, I saw you stand
thirty years hence, the hymn book in your hand,
a fleshy matron who are now sixteen.
The skin is coarser, you are less serene.
What now is fervour is pure habit then.
To bridge devoted and to thought immune,
a connoisseur of flowers and sales of work,
you cycle through round noons where no sins lurk,
your large pink hat a garden round your head,
the cosy wheel of comfort and of God.
And, as I see you, matron of that day,
I wonder, girl, which is the better way –
in innocent fervour tackling antique verse,
or pink Persephone, innocently coarse.