The clouds set immediately after the sun,
that merchant of astonishment, leaving the lower
branches scorched. The moon like the hand
of earth’s clock, unlocked an innermost door
into a past garden.
Fifteen years ago, on Holy Thursday,
they left his corpse on a lonely road. The bloodier
newspapers showed the exact spot in his throat,
greyness of heaped paving stones, triangular danger-signal,
a confessional turned on its side, nicely exposing
his heart, red carnations dropped there.
I have more than once
ducked my head from the sound, it seemed incredible
that a woman was hanging linen up to dry
where rifles dipped their cranes in salute
like ill-groomed palm trees across the faded
vermilion roofs of the thickset city. Grandmother
back from the longer rigmarole of vespers.
Holy Trinity approaching, yet nowhere was there sign
of paint on shutters, weathered to a silver.
The earth was being pulled through some undrawn line
of rose-coloured farms and pearl-grey villages
to plants in their unhurried flow beneath the land,
standing on tiptoe: Christmas flowers that only seem
to live in moonlight, bruisewort, or common daisy,
the Warden pear, now our Black Worcester,
sweet woodruff for Corpus Christi, narcissi
which folk call ‘Laus Tibi’, rosemary, husband
of lavender, the seven spotted ladybird, Our Lady’s
Bird, all guarded by Saint Dorothy of the Cherries,
a German garden saint.