Chapters

Hospital Night

The side-room has sweated years and patience, rolls its one eye

Skyward, nightward; hours beyond sleep I lie;

And the fists of some ardent Plimsoll have laboured this wall

Clear of its plaster beside my chosen head.

Someone murmurs a little, dithers in bed.

Against that frail call

Are imminent the siege-works of a huge nightfall.

Trees, drawn up, rustle forward in the steep time of gloaming;

Crude green labours, gathers itself to a darkness, dreaming

Of perished ice-world summers, birds few, unwieldy, tame.

Darkness is astir, pondering, touching

Kinship with the first Dark in a trunk’s crouching.

Darkness lays claim

To that vague breath-labour of a century, my name.

Someone calls again in his sleep, and my thought is pain,

Pain, till chanticleer will carol truce again

To the faceless joustings of green and green by an old cell,

With time roundabout, and labouring shapes of sin;

To the knotted fists of lightning, or tilting rain;

To the wind’s lapse and swell

—Old die-hards of whom the birds shiver to tell.

Sleep is a labour amid the dilatory elder light;

But now a star is uttered in the long night,

Pitched beyond altercations of tree and storm;

For these, isled upon time, are murmuring, murmuring ever

Of good or evil becoming a darkness; but never

Darkens that star,

Housed in a glory, yet always a wanderer.

It is pain, truth, it is you, my father, beloved friend,

Come to me in the guile and darkness of a day’s end,

As a frail intense blue burning, near nor far.