65.

The ghost of her gaze

plays on me in the ruin

At Bury St Edmunds,

the sprawl of the grounds

The flowers are peacocks

by a deep green blanket

And the books of the abbey library

have long since been displaced

By change and barbarism. They cry

at the threshold, the remains

Of their days in an urn

the vale a mourning the dead

Cannot hear. The children gone

are given to time and its monsters

All too human but changed in myth

to make the nightmare almost bearable.