Celebration

This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1998)

Brilliant, this day - a young virtuoso of a day.Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors,deft hands. And every prodigy of green -whether it’s ferns or lichens or needlesor impatient points of buds on spindly bushes -greener than ever before. And the way the conifershold new cones to the light for the blessing,a festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the windtranscribes for them!A day that shines in the coldlike a first-prize brass band swinging alongthe streetof a coal-dusty village, wholly at oddswith the claims of reasonable gloom.