THREE NEW POEMS The People and the Place
All land exacts a loyalty from those Who claim it, nothing is settled By the simple deed of purchase. The flat alluvial plain rocking with wheat, Chalk pits and gravel quarries Ask alike a pride of place Before the tenant prospers and his tree bears fruit.
This is poor ground, acid and thick With clay, soot falls like small dry rain Coating each leaf and green stick; Nothing grows without help, a process Of low that drives the root through rock And makes it fast in chosen dark Where miners climb to shipwreck houses.
The growth is difficult and so the debt Is buried deep; acknowledgement Is in the ground itself, a parasite That fills and feeds the host.
The climbing seed engraves the stone, Printing its early skeleton, A signature too firm to be defaced.
There it will lie, a hidden cell For meditation, sandwiched between Light and dark, somewhere to call Home, if this is the chosen place; If not, a cell of another kind In which the vagrant is imprisoned,
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