TYGER, TYGER, FADING FAST

our world
is doing a slow fade.

today's young
don't want what we had;
they never do.
one lot clocks off, another clocks on.

you'd think
there was nothing to learn,
nothing to teach.

it's best to keep quiet
when we hear them
mapping the world and
finding tygers.

privately, i don't think
their tygers
are a patch on ours;
but i smile silently,
just as my elders did
when i staked my claim
to their world.

they've gone and i mourn
the loss: i think if we'd shared our world,
all our tygers
would have shone more brightly.

but so it goes:
each generation tucked up under
the earth of the next.
the tragedy is not that we die,
but that our worlds die with us.

one day
there will be no more tygers.
one day
there will be no one left to praise
their lovely faces.

THE HOUSE

this house is very present.  you'd not think

it had held this corner of a Saxon field

more than three hundred years;

though time, to it,

is just one now after another:

the first now and the first laid stone,

to this morning's turbulent now:

the sky dizzy with clouds and

driving blades of wind

through gappy window-frames.

like a great rock, unmoving

(even in the storm

which cracked apart the willow)

the house maintains its vigil:

mindless of sopping windowsills,

dark borders drawn around each flag,

wave-maps rising above the skirting boards

and walls mould-mottled -

these are just what happens

to a house that has known three hundred winters,

and been afloat more than once.

its walls bellying slightly,

there's not a right angle to it: but each stone

sits in mute agreement.

stalwart, it persists; and perhaps

sees us only as trails of light,

cross-webbing its rooms,

insubstantial wraiths: here and then gone.

skirted by the river (in spate, in drought)

and girdled by the field

whose edges are nibbled by rabbits,

the house sits under its thick straw wig,

in which the tiny commerce of woodlice

and the larger scuffings of mice

make whisperings.

at night, as its thick black timbers

creak, it hunkers down beneath stars

it has known since 1670.