The muse of Kilally Meadows (5)

Like they'd done before, the maples will throw their darkness at him

Sad with all those thoughts, and looking sort of thin, he twists inside so often he makes suns see disease in a bud The dark, inconsolable meadow god hasn't crumbled either

The storm that's been promised, slowly blowing in his eyes, doesn't freshen

And unless he faces it like a fact, head erect, and without trying, he won't feel the dawn,

or the circlet of fields, white with frost, where the gentle geese settle in a marshy grass

or the trails he's loved to play in, freely and wisely, with the wind as his shawl or the sweep of another cloudless horizon,

relieved of angry snow; and unless a certain gloomy tree, ringed in grey,

can again catch his eye and the geese with cool elongate necks don't just graze

but rise over him, green-breasted ones, wings taut to the sky, and he can say,

without once crying,

that the bigger they grow, the smaller he feels, he'll see himself as an object of

mourning, again taken suddenly from us, on another cloudless day