The breach widens at every push,
The copingstone falls
To shatter the paved floor.
Then silence for three centuries
While a taste for ruins develops.
Now the military draughtsman
Is training his eye
On the upright of the tower,
Noting the doors that open on treetops;
He catches the light in the elder branches
Rooted in the parapet, captures
The way the pierced loop keeps exactly
The dimensions of the first wounding,
Holding in the same spasm the same long view
Of field and river, cottage and rock
All the way to the deconsecrated
Abbey of the Five Wounds.
Where is the human figure
He needs to show the scale
And all the time that’s passed
And how different things are now?
No crowds engaged in rape or killing,
No marshalling of boy soldiers,
No cutting the hair of novices.
The old woman by the oak tree
Can be pressed into service
To occupy the foreground.
Her feet are warmed by drifting leaves.