Poems

The wind has blown a corner of your shawl Into the fountain, Where it floats and drifts Among the lily-pads Like a tissue of sapphires. But you do not heed it, Your fingers pick at the lichens On the stone edge of the basin, And your eyes follow the tall clouds As they sail over the ilex trees.

Anaemic women, stupidly dressed and shod In squeaky shoes, thump down the nave to laud an expurgated God. Bunches of lights reflect upon the pavement where The twenty benches stop, and through the close, smelled-over air Gaunt arches push up their whited cones, And cover the sparse worshipers with dead men’s stones. Behind his shambling choristers, with flattened feet And red-flapped hood, the Bishop walks, complete In old, frayed ceremonial. The organ wheezes A moldy psalm-tune, and a verger sneezes. But the great Cathedral spears into the sky Shouting for joy. What is the red-flapped Bishop praying for, by the bye?