One after another the windows that made it gave up looking.
The monitors cut out. No dashes for freedom:
there’s always management. The sky
that had cared for the acre since the ocean receded
began taking it back again without comment.
Over a bank where nine
tall old native cherries had oozed, split
and tottered down to pulp the stretch of air
where years of magpies bungled their nests
kept not a memory of all that racket.
The plot filling up fast with curved shapes,
some very small, some moving; brambles
arching above themselves and breaking in waves
down inside the boundary wall. And above,
the patch where design had planted saplings at random
to develop the pretence of a little wood – rowan, field maple, hazel,
goat willow, crab, walnut, sloe – had become
the little wood.