The sea is all washed up. The house rocks
On through the night; nothing will see reason.
Most things have left us, and some people too.
Strange the speed with which they disappeared.
And colours died that gave a shape to things,
Till what is lost comes vaguely in these dreams.

And the dead sad words float out in foolish space
And have the weight of atoms in a wind;
They do not want to come to earth again.
I saw their tears unflowing in the sky.

In an old house I heard some words for flowers:
‘Buttercup’, ‘lupin’, ‘truth’ and ‘fluredelee’.
And there were names for trees: ‘barkbrown’, ‘oak’
And ‘hard’, the loveliest of all, they said,
Easy to live with and soft on the eye.
On a saint’s day you climbed into its soul.