West Harling
Under the lime trees' yellow leaves and damp October sunlight, out of the wind and warm, Nature's unnaturally kind this autumn.
But four young people take me for a walk To a deserted church in good repair, And one says weather will be like this now: Warm and not as it used to be, with storms And droughts that last for months, and the landscape changing, And life being rarer and perhaps, confined To unlikely regions, soon not possible.
We visit the churchyard and stare in through glass Panes at the silence of the lectern, pews Gathering fine dust. Possibly even bats Don't find a toehold in this shut up place Restored and then used once a year since then.
Norfolk's a dream of how things might have been, A different proposition from the life We all return to, Monday. Something narrow About the present moment if we ever Managed to live in it and nowhere else.
Oliver Bernard
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