Vincit qui se vincit

for Joy

On the phone from Toronto you tell us

April has arrived with her settled airs.

This morning in your garden snow lies

in wilting pools over the grasses and beds

and you think of all the hidden flowers

they told you would never grow there –

Verbena, Sweet William, Canterbury bells

unpeeling in the dew-clear summer –

and remember too those bright ones cut

and arranged for the high assembly halls

of your wartime English boarding school,

whose motto you misheard among the rifts.

Winky, Kissy, Winky, you thought it went.

And what’s this coming through just now,

in a whiteness where the eye mislays itself?

Something seen clearly when seen askew

like a boat glimpsed lightly on the mist, or

your Snowdrops kindling against the snow.

Sparrow

That one who came tapping at the window,

brown-suited, upright at dawn, my father

said was his father flown home for summer

to help outside where our help wouldn’t do,

and began to wink and talk to the old man

about changes here, the new cow house,

how he broke those lower fields into one,

keeping always straight and almost serious.

That was remembered again today, stirred

in the spring-ground of the milking shed

where light softens beyond the stalls

and shafts, and I heard a song thrush call,

bright, unexpected and familiar.

Where I turned, and almost began to answer.